THE INTEGRATION OF FIELD OBSERVATION VIDEOS INTO THE TEACHER PREPARATION PROGRAM: A MISSING COMPONENT TO THE FIELD EXPERIENCE

The importance of providing high-quality field placements for a teacher preparation program is critical. In today’s high-stakes classroom it is becoming increasingly difficulty to implement. First-rate field placements are the foundation of any teacher preparation program but are limited because of the changing landscape. It is not always possible to provide pre-service teachers with a wide array of field placement opportunities to experience diverse populations, alternative pedagogical practices, and/or state-of-the-art technological enhancements. This makes it difficult to place pre-service teachers in field settings that provide a bridge between classroom knowledge and theories learned and the practice of teaching in the real-world.

A program has been developed to expand the field placement opportunity with the use of technology and videos. Technology use and integration into field observations is steadily increasing and being used to expose pre-service educators to diverse settings, unfamiliar economic classrooms, and to an array of instructional opportunities not readily available by traditional field placements. Faculty members decided to take advantage of the technology to allow our teacher candidates to create videos to reflect on their experience in the classroom and to share their experience with other teacher candidates. The pre-service educators were provided with a variety of mobile technologies, such as iPads and video cameras, for use to record videos, take pictures, and notes during the field experience. Integrating technology allowed the candidates to share and reflect on their experience and provide real-world examples for other teacher candidates to learn different teaching and learning techniques that they would not be exposed to otherwise.

The focus of the correlational study was to identify if the use of peer observation videos had an impact on learning new teaching concepts; if the integration of field observation videos had an impact to observe and better understand the different aspects about teaching, and; if teacher candidate would recommend the use of video observations as full or partial field requirements.