Through the looking glass: video coaching

Through the looking glass: video coaching

 Collaboration, exchange of views and reflection play a very significant role in most teacher training and development programmes. Often teachers are given opportunities to develop themselves professionally by experiencing team work in these programmes through several developmental activities such as video coaching. Video-coaching is a reflective technique, which helps teachers to observe and evaluate their own teaching in the classroom through self-reflection and peer feedback. The aims of this paper are to present the video coaching project implemented in Başkent University School of Foreign Languages as part of the inset programme with its rationale and procedure and to discuss the results of the case study conducted at the end of the project. 51 instructors, whose teaching experiences change between 6 to 30 years, participated in the project. Qualitative data was collected through a questionnaire and informal conversations during the appraisal meetings at the end of the term. The gathered data were analysed through qualitative methods. The overall findings displayed that the instructors had generally positive feelings about the video coaching project despite their experience levels and the project being compulsory. The case study also showed that there has been a positive change in the attitudes of some instructors who previously showed hesitation towards recording their lessons. Moreover, the feedback collected was useful in shaping and improving the future video coaching projects. Keywords: in-service teacher training, reflection, video-coaching, cooperation, feedback