Using MRTs to Improve Education

The potential of audio and video recording as tools for studying and improving classroom teaching has been recognized since the 1960s, when these technologies became more widely available and affordable. It was not until the advent of digital recording in the 1990s, however, that we started to imagine that we could develop large databases of video and other artifacts of practice. The potential of multimedia representations of teaching (MRTs) lies in their ability to represent teaching in a concrete and detailed way; indeed, the difference between more and less effective teaching is most often about the details of implementation, and MRTs provide a means of representing those details. MRTs provide referents for developing a shared vocabulary for describing teaching; a means of communicating about teaching; and objects that support learning to analyze teaching.

Although MRTs have been increasingly used by researchers and teacher educators, I believe that the greatest potential of MRTs to improve education will be realized when teachers themselves begin to use such tools regularly as a means of contributing to, and learning from, an expanding professional knowledge base. Although some improvements in teaching will result from professional development, the most significant and long-lasting improvements will result from developing and sharing knowledge to support sustainable improvements in teaching. This concept is not new, but the move from concept to implementation has proven problematic. To realize the promise of using MRTs as a means of representing and sharing professional knowledge we need to specify, first, what constitutes a shareable piece of knowledge about teaching.

To be shareable, a single “knowledge nugget” should (I hypothesize) include the following:

1. •A clear and precise statement of an instructional goal (what we want students to learn) to which this piece of knowledge applies;
   

2. •A clear statement of what the approach is (be it an instructional strategy, instructional materials, etc.) and – importantly – an explicit theory of action that relates the instructional innovation to student learning;
   

3. •A representation of the details of implementation (which may include video, specific instructional materials, student work, etc.), and an attached commentary that links the implementation to the theory of action;
   

4. •A means of assessing students’ progress towards the goal (this can be informal, but there must be some way of gauging the effectiveness of the knowledge);
   

5. •Assumptions about the context in which the knowledge applies (e.g., within a particular curriculum context, or general instructional approach)
   

This may not be complete – indeed, I believe that research needs to be done to document the processes by which teachers actually use and learn from such knowledge nuggets, and the contexts in which teachers could actually digest and make use of such knowledge. I do believe, based on my own experience, however, that attempts to communicate instructional innovations that are missing one of these components may not be effective for improving teaching.

Who should create these knowledge nuggets? Although it is interesting to consider the possibility that practitioners themselves would be the main source of knowledge nuggets, I believe that the creation of such nuggets will primarily be done by experts (bearing in mind that some experts may have come from the ranks of practitioners). I say this based on my own experience working with mathematics teachers, where practitioners often are held back by gaps in their subject matter knowledge (of all kinds). In this sense, I believe that development of the knowledge base for education may be more similar to the process described by Douthwaite (2007) to describe the development of the wind turbine in the Netherlands. Like Douthwaite, however, I believe that experts alone will never generate long-lasting improvements in teaching unless there is a system for collecting the detailed feedback and modifications that only practitioners can provide. A knowledge base, in my view, should be the place where ideas are shared, tested, and improved, and where theories linking teaching to learning are evolved.

Similar to teaching, it is the details that matter: Exactly how to generate such a knowledge base, how to organize it, how to store it, and, most importantly, how to build the cultural routines in the teaching profession that will enable teachers to contribute to and learn from such a knowledge base, are the issues that will determine whether MRTs can fulfill their potential.