Teacher Education
Sumter County, Alabama, ranks in the ten lowest counties for average household income in the U.S. It’s a region of the American South with a long history of economic struggle, going back to the cotton plantations that sprang up in the nineteenth century. This region running East to West across the state is known as the Black Belt, named after the wide belt of fertile black topsoil.
Today, many poor rural Alabamians are educating and being educated in the region’s rural schools. Education is seen as an antidote to poverty and a ticket to a better life. But even now, there’s a shortage of highly qualified teachers in Alabama.
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More education requires more highly qualified teachers. That’s the challenge facing the faculty of the University of West Alabama (UWA), a historic university located in Sumter County.
UWA started as a teacher's college 1835. Now they offer 47 different graduate programs. Click To TweetAn early adopter of online education, UWA has offered online teacher education degrees for over 15 years, enrolling almost 3,000 graduate students in their online program last year alone. In fact, UWA admits more teacher education candidates each year than any other school in Alabama.
Dr. Jan G. Miller, Dean of the College of Education at UWA, personifies the university’s resolve to produce excellent, highly qualified teachers and educators ready to make meaningful changes in Alabama’s schools, despite challenges.
And UWA is attacking these bold goals in a big way.
Under Dean Miller’s leadership, UWA has developed programs to deliver special training in elementary education, early childhood education, and special education. To combat a lack of highly qualified teachers staying in rural Alabama, UWA launched its scholarship program, Black Belt Teacher Corps. The university also developed Alt-A programs to fast-track non-traditional students who already have Bachelor’s degrees through their Masters of Education program.
The University of West Alabama is producing large numbers of highly qualified teachers by leveraging technology to empower teachers. Click To TweetIt’s not always an easy job, but UWA is producing large numbers of highly qualified teachers.
It’s common for UWA students to be the first generation in their family to make it to college. Frequently from at-risk schools, bad situations, or unfortunate circumstances, these students arrive at college with great desire but very little preparation for the rigors of college.
It’s still no small challenge to bridge the gap between underprepared students and increasingly rigorous CAEP accreditation standards for new teachers. In 2018 Alabama will be adopting EdTPA standards for teacher certification, which only increases the level of preparedness required of new graduates.
But despite these challenges, UWA is thriving and consistently laying down a track record of superior performance. How?
In addition to remarkable faculty, UWA is leveraging technology like GoReact to empower highly qualified teachers and make time for high-impact activities.
UWA has been looking for ways to better prepare their students for edTPA certification. One of the oft-repeated fears from students is the video submission portion of the certification assessment.
By using GoReact to record students frequently throughout their program, students get familiar with delivering lessons on camera. Stage fright and nervous butterflies are long gone by the time they record their EdTPA submission. By then they are well-practiced, have received copious feedback on their delivery, and have a huge advantage over peers who start recording themselves only when it’s time to submit their edTPA application.
The logistics of travel for observing student-teaching interns is a big issue at UWA, as it is for many universities across the country.
UWA has student interns placed in schools all over the state of Alabama. Enrollment in the program continues to increase and travel expenses are on the rise, but the budget for observations hasn’t kept up. Budget notwithstanding, every single student intern must receive observations.
For each observation, a supervisor must travel to the cooperating school—sometimes as far as four and a half hours away—then spend two to three hours on site. The program must pay for transportation, meals, and the supervisor’s time. One year, UWA’s overruns for travel alone amounted to over $30,000.
They needed to make a change. A big one.
The College of Education started looking for a way to prepare interns for certification and lower travel costs in the program. They needed a remote solution to record lessons, help interns reflect, and spare the supervisors hours of driving.
That’s when they discovered GoReact, a web-based video software for capturing recordings of students and giving time-coded feedback on their performance. The video observation tool sounded like a perfect fit, but there were still questions. Would a high-tech solution prove too complex for some of the older faculty?
Dr. Miller authorized a pilot to see if GoReact truly was the needed solution to their travel issues and, more importantly, if her instructors would actually use it.
The result? According to Dr. Miller, “GoReact was so easy. Our clinical supervisors, many of whom are retired teachers who tend to be scared of technology, are now some of our biggest cheerleaders.”
UWA has cut their travel expenses drastically by using GoReact. Plus, each student is being observed more frequently and getting more constructive feedback for each video observation.
Before GoReact, UWA students didn’t have a mechanism for recording a lesson and reflecting on it. The interns can now watch themselves teach and reflect on their performance right from the beginning of their program. Clinical supervisors also found that the feedback they shared in GoReact became a springboard for more learning and more discussions.
That wasn’t all. Another challenge UWA faced was providing all interns with the constructive feedback they needed.
The clipboard and paper rubric approach—a staple of teacher education programs for years—wasn’t providing the timely formative feedback student interns need when honing their craft. A recent Harvard publication supports what Dr. Miller knew from experience: to be done right, observations needed to be conducted through video.
Dr. Miller said, “What you see on paper and what you see in action can be completely different things. Teachers get better when they know better. The only way that they are going to know better is to see video evidence of what they are doing.”
Again, GoReact was the perfect choice. Aside from allowing remote video observations, GoReact also allowed UWA faculty to dramatically improve the quality of video observations, all in less time.
Dr. Miller commented, “Some clinical supervisors observe five teachers in a day without even leaving their office or home—and they’re giving ten times more constructive feedback on their video observations. GoReact’s time-coded comments have allowed teachers to give better feedback than ever.”
Harvard research supports that student teaching observations need to be conducted through video. Click To TweetSupervisors also have the option of leaving video replies on interns’ videos. They can actually turn the camera around and model a teaching technique back to the student. According to Dr. Miller, “This is the kind of feedback that you can’t even put on paper.”
GoReact has also helped UWA solve several problems they’ve experienced with technology in the past:
The UWA team was concerned that spotty Wi-Fi might cause issues for students. According to Dr. Miller, “Because we’re so rural, we don’t have high-speed Internet everywhere we go. But with GoReact, you don’t really have to be online—you can just record form your device and submit the video when you get back online.”
GoReact has a seamless integration to most university LMS systems. At UWA, they currently use Blackboard Learn. After some initial concern about integration with Blackboard, faculty have caught on that GoReact works right in the environment they’re used to.
Instead of expensive, complicated recording equipment, the interns now use their own smartphones and laptops to record. Even non-tech savvy supervisors have no trouble using GoReact in the program.
The team at UWA are creatively pioneering new solutions in teacher education to meet the challenges of our changing education landscape. And it shows.
When asked about their next round of initiatives with GoReact, responses included developing new rubrics within GoReact, teaching classroom management skills, building a library of exemplary videos from UWA students, implementation in the nursing education program, and more.
Hester said, “We’re really enjoying it. I’m just excited to see really how far we can take it. Opening the boundaries to other states and being able to serve more students than we have right now.” This opens up top-notch education resources to anyone serious about a career in education.
When asked how she would sum up her experience with GoReact, Dr. Miller said, “It’s a tool that helps us produce highly qualified teachers.”
See how GoReact solves problems by checking out additional case studies.
