Videotaping Your Research Lesson & Debriefing Session

As part of your lesson study your team is asked to videotape two events: 1) your research lesson the second time it is taught and 2) the meeting following your research lesson when your team debriefs the lesson.

Why videotape the lesson? In higher education instructors have few opportunities to see examples of teaching in their own fields. Videotapes of lessons could be important learning experiences for instructors. In the Lesson Study Project videos could be especially valuable as they depict not just what the instructor does but how students respond to the lesson—what they do and how they think in response to the instructional activities.

Video can help other instructors get a sense of what the lesson looks like in situ. It supplements the lesson plan which describes what is supposed to take placeand provides a source of evidence about how the lesson actually plays out. Combined with the team’s observations and examples of student written work, video can bring to life examples of key moments, interactions, and turning points in the lesson.

Based on experiences in the Lesson Study Project we offer severalobservations and suggestions about videotaping.

Decide in advance what you want to do with the video. What is the purpose of the videotape? Do you want to depict segments of the entire lesson? Do you want to focus on specific episodes or parts of the lesson? Do you plan to focus on specific students, small group work, whole class discussion?

Develop a plan for videotaping.It is difficult to shoot good footage of students as they react to a lesson. Prior to the lesson discuss what you want on film. Be sure to convey the plan to the videographer.

Audio, audio, audio! It is difficult to videotape students in the classroom, but it is even harder to get clear audio. Many videotapes of research lessons turn out to be useless because of poor quality audio. Ask your videographer to pay special attention to audio. Some teams have taken their research lessons into distance education classrooms where each seat has its own microphone.

Videotape cannot substitute for live observation. Live observation is a different experience than a videotape of the lesson. For details see the excerpt below from Lesson Study: A handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change by Catherine Lewis.

Include short video clips with your final report. You will need to edit your video into one or two short video clips (~5-8 minutes) for your final report. See examples

Decide whether to include video clips in your final report! Include video clips if they add something useful to your report.

Excerpt from Lesson Study: A handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change by Catherine Lewis

Videotape offers certain advantages over live observation of research lessons, such as flexibility of scheduling and the possibility of repeated viewing. Some teachers feel more comfortable being videotaped (with the knowledge that they can later choose not to share the video) than being observed live. But live research lessons are the heart of lesson study in Japan, and teachers sometimes travel hundreds of miles to attend them. Why do Japanese teachers accord so much importance to live observation?

When teachers watch a research lesson, they notice many things that cannot be gathered from student tests and written work, or sometimes even from videotapes. For example, teachers study students' engagement, persistence, interactions within small groups, and tsubuyaki (under-breath exclamations or aha's). During research lessons teachers observe students' whole demeanor toward learning and toward one another.

Although educators new to lesson study sometimes imagine that lesson plans will capture the essence of their lesson study work, student learning and development cannot be assessed by looking at a lesson plan. The "Tale of Two Lessons" (Figure 11) illustrates the danger of trying to identify a good lesson without actual observation. To say "It was a good lesson but the students didn't get it," is like saying "the operation was successful but the patient died."

Videotape, audiotape, lesson plans, photographs, and student work are all used extensively by Japanese teachers to document research lessons. But they are not regarded as a substitute for live observation of research lessons, when teachers can actively record the participation of all students, scan the room for evidence that students understand a task, closely study the work of a small group of students, and pick up the general mood and interest level in the classroom. Videographers must decide (generally in advance of the lesson) where to focus the camera(s), and this inevitably narrows the stream of experience captured on tape. In contrast, live observation enables teachers to follow the "swiftly flowing river" of instruction in unanticipated directions, and to pick up the mutterings and shining eyes of the students.

Figure 11

A Tale of Two Lessons

Several weeks apart, I saw the "same" probability lesson in two US fourth-grade classrooms. The lesson's basic plan is:

  • Working in pairs, students draw ten marbles from a large sack of marbles. Each pair of students then predicts the proportion of black and white marbles in the big sack based on their own sample of ten marbles.
  • Students look at the data from all the pairs of students, and decide whether to revise their own predictions.
  • Students discuss whether using the data from all the pairs is likely to lead to a better prediction than using only their own data, and why or why not.
  • Students count the marbles in the sack, and see whether their individual prediction or the group average came closer to the actual number.

In the fourth grade classroom where I first saw this lesson, it worked like a charm. Students quickly recognized the power of additional data: "It's just like a baseball average. The more times someone has been at bat, the more accurate the batting average is likely to be." Students in this class were participating in a project that emphasized "a caring community of learners." By working together to shape class rules and participating in regular class meetings, they had become very skilled at working together, and their teacher consciously avoided external rewards and competition, preferring to have students operate from intrinsic motivation and a personal commitment to everyone's learning.

In a demographically similar classroom just a few miles away, however, the lesson flopped; few students were willing to revise their initial estimates. Very reluctant to admit they were "wrong," students busily defended their initial predictions and refused to use data gathered by other pairs of students, justifying their refusal with criticisms like "you probably chose all your marbles from one part of the bag." The reward system and pervasive sense of competition in this classroom seemed to make it difficult for students to revise their predictions. The very different fates of the same lesson plan in two classes illustrate both the power of classroom social and motivational climate, and the impossibility of judging a "good" lesson on paper.