Increasing In-Service Teachers’ Willingness to be Videoed to Support Professional Learning

Increasing and compelling research demonstrates the affordances of personal video footage as an informative and transformational tool in teacher professional learning (PL), yet many in-service teachers avoid engaging in this practice. This Australian Research Council funded study tracked teacher willingness to use video to capture the application of PL over 12 months in a rural Australian primary school. Data from questionnaires, video-based learning conversations, and collaborative sharing sessions demonstrated a strong increasing trend in the number of teachers volunteering to be videoed across three iterations of research. Thematic analysis highlighted five key factors as catalysts for increased teacher participation in engaging with video as a professional learning (PL) tool. These factors include – safe relationships and the building of relational trust; personalized connection of PL to classroom practice; an effective video annotation repository system; teacher agency within an iterative structure; and time – the need for external support systems. This study found that when these factors were addressed, willingness to engage in using the power of video as a tool to support teacher PL increased.