SBIR Phase I: TeachScribe: Supporting teacher professional development through collaborative reflection and annotation of video

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project will develop a teacher professional development tool, to support teachers' collaborative reflection on video of their own practice. This tool will address the conceptual challenges teachers face when examining, reflecting on and discussing instructional practice, as well as the technical challenges of preparing, annotating, and sharing video. The tool will simplify video capture, annotation, reflection and sharing within a single, easy-to-use software application. The Phase I objectives involve working with two partners, a commercial teacher professional development firm and a university researcher who uses video extensively in pre-service and in-service settings, to (1) refine use models of reflective video analysis in professional development settings; (2) conduct market analysis and strategic planning; (3) develop prototypes for software application server and client, integrated tools for collaborative reflection on video of teacher practice, and (4) conduct formative user tests of these prototypes with teachers representing our target market. The outcomes will include a refined set of use models for video in professional development that can be used to drive the design of software; proof of concept prototypes of application server and client components suitable for pilot testing and integration with existing teacher professional development systems; and established strategic partnerships with other organizations as a part of the scaling up process towards full commercial deployment. The goal of this research work is to improve teacher professional development. Video of teaching practice has much potential as a source of modeling, an object of reflection, and a conversational catalyst to facilitate discussion of teaching practice. But video remains a difficult medium to work with due to its time-based nature, the sheer size of video files, and the lack of tools that support reflective analysis. By removing these barriers to adoption, this application enables a new form of community discourse around professional practice centered on video. It infuses the discourse with new modes of evidence-based evaluation. The enterprise-wide nature of the tool encourages participation across individuals, groups, and districts, making it easy for all teachers to produce and consume content while maintaining control over their own footage. The potential market for this application includes 14,000 school districts nationwide and over 1300 pre-service institutions that train tens of thousands of new teachers every year. Beyond teacher professional development, support for the easy capture, annotation, reflection, collaboration, and sharing of video has a broad appeal to students as well as other markets that make use of digital video for collaborative film editing, translation and transcription, or film critique.