Every Teacher Question From a Single Lesson

An experimental classroom video.

I taught a class months ago that I'm still feasting on. I head to the refrigerator some nights and there it is, right there under the foil, in some ways tastier than when it was fresh out of the oven. I drift back to that class during certain moments of respite, replaying certain exchanges between me and the students, wondering about alternatives, creating connections between them, etc etc. It’s delicious.

Not only was it a very interesting class but I also filmed it. I served up one clip from the class in my last newsletter about feedback. I’ll serve up several more over the next couple of weeks that I’d like your help digesting.

For today, my question is broadly: “What good is classroom video?”

By the end of this year I hope to have dozens of hours of classroom video of very interesting teachers doing very interesting things with a very interesting math curriculum. So I’m tuned into the ways people use classroom video.

“Watch these 45-60 minutes of video and learn something about teaching,” sounds much less useful to me as a teacher learning assignment than something much shorter and more heavily excerpted.

Here is an excerpt of classroom video that I am 100% sure I have never seen before. I’m wondering how it might be useful for teacher learning. This is every single question I asked over the entire class. 

Logistical. Mathematical. Evaluative. Interpretive. Whole group. Small group. Individual. All of them.

Perhaps it’s too weird and disjointed to be useful, but I suspect it actually gives a pretty good sense of the lesson and that it may open up several conversation starters:

• What different kinds of questions are asked? Could you put them into categories?

• What effect do you think those different questions would have on students and their thinking?

What can you do with this? What other kinds of classroom video have been useful useful to you in your development as a teacher?