Video Technology as a Support for Teacher Education Reform

This review explores the relationship between video-technology and teacher education reform. Important changes in teacher education are reviewed and the ways in which video-technology can provide support for these changes are identified. Next, the specific application of video-technology in supporting preservice teachers to transform their beliefs, acquire pedagogical content knowledge, and develop pedagogical understanding of learners is discussed. The review suggests that video technology has the potential to expose preservice teachers to rich and diverse teaching situations and create flexible ways of representing and connecting information on teaching for the purposes of teacher education. However, its effectiveness is more often assumed than carefully documented. This can be explained by the conceptual ambiguity of what counts as the effects of video-technology on teacher learning as well as the methodological complexity of measuring these effects. ********** Over the past decade, changing preservice teachers' ideas about teaching, developing their pedagogical content knowledge, and nurturing their pedagogical understanding about diverse learners have become an important emphases for many teacher education programs. New approaches such as individual and collaborative reflection, case studies, and guided apprenticeships in the field, have been widely used to support these changes in teacher education. However, teacher educators often face two challenges as they are using these new approaches to help their preservice teachers learn to teach. One, how do you create a meaningful and comprehensive context for preservice teachers' individual, collaborative, and multi-level examinations about the issues, events, and situations? And two, how do you help them deal with the problems of isolation in their fieldwork and inconsistent expectations from the existing context of teaching and their programs? Video-technologies, including traditional media such as television and videocassette recorders, and more recent developments--digital video, video-conferencing, and multimedia applications (instructional CD-ROMs and the Internet)--are seen as important tools for teacher educators to deal with these challenges. In particular, video technologies are expected to provide more flexible ways of representing various teaching situations, allow easy access to a variety of data related to a particular event or issue, and connect preservice teachers to different instructional contexts. However, in spite of these expectations, the relationship between video-technology and teacher education reform is not clearly conceptualized and the effects of using video-technologies in supporting the changes in teacher education are not carefully identified. Drawing on a review of the relevant literature in the fields of teacher learning and educational technology, this article strives to explore these issues. To conduct this review, the ERIC database was searched for journal articles or research reports since 1990 using the keywords, "Teacher Education and Video" and "Teacher Learning and Video." The relevant articles referenced in the studies retrieved from this initial search were also used. In addition, articles, book chapters, and conference presentations from personal collections were included. These sources lead to 90 position papers, program evaluations, and research studies from which, those publications unrelated to or without substantial data analysis of video-technology applications in the context of teacher education reform were eliminated. Twenty studies emerged from this process that were categorized and reviewed in this article (Table 1). The article begins with a description of the conceptualization of the relationship between teacher education reform and video technology. TEACHER EDUCATION CHANGES AND VIDEO TECHNOLOGY Teaching Reform and Teacher Education Teaching in the United States has been surprisingly consistent as shown in historical reviews (Cuban, 1993) and contemporary observations (Good-lad, 1983). …