Frederick Erickson
University of California, Los Angeles

Frederick Erickson is George F. Kneller Professor of Anthropology of Education in the Social Research Methods division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A pioneer in the use of video in research on teaching and learning in classrooms, he is currently the principal investigator in a National Science Foundation supported project that is developing a website to portray the teaching of science in early elementary grades.

These comments begin by applauding the "Making Teaching Public" effort and then go on to consider some of the difficulties in organizing multimedia to portray teaching and learning practice in ways that do justice to its complexity and multidimensionality. Issues and tradeoffs in the initial shooting of video footage that adequately captures the complexity of teaching and learning are also discussed as well as the importance of taking into account in website design the prior knowledge and viewpoints of website users.

Showing the “how” of teaching by means of a multimedia array of different kinds of information is more difficult than it might seem at first glance. The new website “Making Teaching Public” is a groundbreaking effort, going much further than anything like it that I have seen. Yet teaching is so elusive, so complex, that as one visits this website one realizes how little we still know about teaching—and therefore about how to represent it in multimedia. Thus “Making Teaching Public” is at once a significant achievement and a challenge to further achievement. It’s a bit as if we were able to watch the first flight of the Wright brothers’ biplane—the very success of so daring an attempt inspires us to imagine still more.

It ought to be easy to use multimedia to make teaching public. Teaching is complex, and multimedia affords a wide array of means of representing that complexity, as well as the possibility to store and retrieve theoretically unlimited amounts of information on any of the various representation modes that multimedia supports—video clips, still photographs, written commentary, oral “voice-over” commentary, analytic charts, frequency tables, links to information on other sites on the web.

Yet it took years for this website to be launched. Some of the reasons why are reviewed in an overview essay by Tom Hatch and Desiree Pointer-Mace, titled “Key Questions for Representing Teaching and Learning Using Multimedia and the Web.” On the website homepage the link to this essay is found at the very bottom of the page, labeled (perhaps too modestly) DISCUSSION. I suggest that any visitor to the website click on that link, skim the essay, and then work back and forth between it and the rest of the website. Just as the website presents the most extensive multimedia portrayal of teaching practice that is now available, so the essay is the most complete discussion I have yet seen of the complexities of producing multimedia representations of teaching that actually achieves the aim of making teaching public.

The essay makes four main points: (1) multimedia as presented in a website permits “layering” of information, and this is appropriate because of the complexity of teaching, (2) the various teachers in the array of cases presented in the website emphasize differing aspects of the complexity of practice--there is a question of whether a certain set of aspects may be common to all teaching and whether in the future those aspects might usefully provide a common organizing grid—common categories of practice and common “layering” organization--across cases such as the metaphor that appears in Hutchinson’s site, “class anatomy,” (3) the tension between “scope and granularity” in the various cases—representation to make the visitor “forest-wise” about broad issues and aims in teaching or “tree-wise” about fine details of teaching/learning tactics, or both, (4) the autonomy of visitors in constructing their own sense as they use the website—they bring to their viewing of teaching practice their own viewpoints about teaching practice, and they can at will skim the material in the website or engage it in a more thoroughgoing way—with the consequence that what the creator of the website thought the “meaning” of it was may not be what the visitor ends up seeing in it.

Let me comment on the first two of these points and then on the latter two. As for “layering,” that is one way a website deals with the presentation of complexity—embedded layers of generality, in class-inclusion taxonomy. Another way to think of complexity and to deal with it presentationally is to think of distinctions of kind across multiple dimensions of practice, as if “teaching practice” were a multidimensional space and various dimensions were analogous to microtome slices through a three dimensional object—each slice, coming at a different angle, reveals some aspects of the organization of the three dimensional space as a whole, and each slice also conceals some aspects of organization. Class-inclusion “layering” by itself may not clarify anything—indeed a recent comment on the web by Edward Tufte makes a strong case against overuse of the hierarchical embedding by which PowerPoint presentations are conventionally organized (see E. Tufte “PowerPoint Does Rocket Science” at www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/). But figuring out which combinations of dimensions of contrast can adequately capture the complexity of teaching—that’s an issue of basic importance, which the essay by Hatch and Pointer Mace emphasizes. One can see in the website as a whole how important is this matter of organizing a particular portrayal by adopting a particular way of slicing through the complexity of teaching. I will discuss this in some detail in the remarks that follow.

One of the things I find most interesting in the set of cases in the “Making Teaching Public” website is that each teacher who prepared a website case sliced the complexity of teaching somewhat differently. Yvonne Hutchinson’s website presented video and other detailed information about a single day’s high school English lesson. She locates that lesson in the overall history of teaching for that year—there is a link for “how they got here” (what things looked like at the beginning of the year, and a link for “where they went next” (showing student work and comment from the following year). Under the heading “Content and Reflections” there are links for “Thinking with text” (a crucial set of skills to be taught), “Project Snapshot,” “Teaching context” (school and students), and “Video comments” (Hutchinson discussing her approach overall). There is also a heading for “Materials and Strategies,” with links for “Strategies for promoting literate discourse, "Question-answer relationships,” and “Anticipation Guide” (for reading), and a “Reading Response Prompt” (with a sample of student response writing).

In contrast, Marsha Pincus presented her teaching of an entire unit in high school English-- a study of the play “Macbeth.” On the horizontal axis, across the top of her home page appear the following three headings: / Whose English?: Getting students into the language of Shakespeare / Shakespeare’s Blues: Making personal connections to Shakespeare / Interrogating Macbeth: Crafting a literary analysis. On the vertical axis, along the left margin, appear the following items (listed from the top down) Content,
Context, Teaching Practice / Student Work, Reflections, Resources, Standards / Archive.

The home page assembled by Jennifer Myers used the same list of headings  at the left margin, on the vertical axis as had the home page done by Marsha Pincus.  (This may indicated a move within the whole website toward this array of links  as a standard set of categories for organizing the presentation of each new case.) Myers is portraying an overall approach to literacy instruction in early grades—“Reader and Writer Workshop”   (this is neither the portrayal of a single day of instruction, nor of a single unit of subject matter,  but of an approach used across the course of a school year).   On the horizontal axis, across the top of her home page  Myers presents three main headings as links:  /Setting Norms:  Rituals and routines to support the workshop approach / Readers and Writers Workshop /  Touchstone Texts:  Revisiting favorite books for new lessons.

Melissa Pedraza’s home page was organized without the standard categories on the vertical axis. Her site was organized to illustrate two primary foci of teaching for literacy in the first grade: “text to text connections” and “accountable talk”. Pedraza placed at the left margin the following links, in top to bottom order: Curriculum: reading, Focus: text to text connections and accountable talk, Reflections: on team teaching, inclusion, and teacher mentorship, and Resources: Melissa’s materials. Links that appeared on the horizontal axis at the top of the home page were: /First Grade Literacy / Accountable Talk / Reading Block / Inclusion / Teacher Mentoring.

The various sites also differed in the amounts of student work they presented and in the prominence with which student work was presented.   They differed as well in how much emphasis was placed on various “backstage” aspects of teaching,  including planning—sequencing topics and devising special learning activities—and the assessment of student work to guide next steps in instruction.  Further, they differed in the length of the strip of instruction that they portrayed—a single, crucially exemplary lesson, a connected series of lessons in a whole unit, a set of strategies employed across an entire school year.

This diversity of organizing approaches across the cases certainly shows the complexity of teaching  (and the difficulty that is inherent in portraying that complexity). To my mind, looking across the cases underscores the complexity of teaching even more than does close examination of one case at a time—my hunch is that visitors will get smarter about teaching by viewing a number of the cases comparatively rather than by concentrating on a single case.  (The latter approach also risks treating a given case as if it showed practice that was directly imitable by the viewer—it seems to me that the cases are best considered as evocative portrayals to stimulate reflection and possible adaptation of new approaches into one’s own practice, not as models that are exactly imitable point by point.)  The diversity of organizing approaches that is apparent across the cases also suggests that at this early stage of development in multimedia portrayals of teaching practice (recall my Wright brothers analogy) there is no “one best way” to organize all cases.  To underscore this point let me describe an approach to website organization that my colleagues and I—classroom teachers in collaboration with university faculty, all involved in authoring—are taking in a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We are building a website to show early grades science instruction for deep conceptual understanding. The website is not yet operational—we are assembling and field testing it this year and may have a beta version available in winter 2008.

The instructional approach is much influenced by that found at the pre-school at Reggio Emilia (Edwards, et al 1998), with an emphasis on key concepts that manifest in firsthand sensory experience by students and on multiple means used by students to represent their understanding of the information and concepts they are learning.  In alternating years the students study physical science  (the physics of matter, energy, and motion) or life science  (the life cycle of plants and their ecological relations with pollinators).  No textbooks are used for this study, although plenty of “real books’ are employed, as well as information accessed by students on the Internet.   The school site is the laboratory school at UCLA, Corinne A Seeds University Elementary School—for further information on the school and its general approach to pedagogy as well as further information on our NSF professional development website project go to the school’s website (www.ues.gseis.ucla.edu , view the information on the school overall and then click on the link for “Research” (or go to the website for the research center [www.connect.gseis.ucla.edu ],  click “Connect”, and navigate from there back to the school. 

We are organizing the new website on science instruction according to the following dimensions or aspects of teaching practice. They appear as a “navigation menu” in a block at the left margin, on the vertical axis of each page in the website: Planning (formal, flexible, project (including content standards), Environment (physical-including instructional materials, social-including interactional routines), Experiences (firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand), and Representation (students showing their understanding through multiple semiotic media-talking, writing, analytic drawing, artistic drawing, modeling with found materials, preparing charts and tables that show contrast and frequency distribution, dancing). The overall organizing image is that of a “Classroom Ecosystem” in which all the aspects are present at all times and are integrated through relations of continuous and simultaneous mutual influence. (N.B. this is a different set of “microtome slices” through the multidimensional space of teaching practice from any of those in the cases found at the “Making Teaching Public” website, and the point here is not to present our UES website prototype's set of slices as somehow “better” in a general sense than the differing combinations of slices presented by the various teachers at the Carnegie website. Rather I want to say that, for any given portrayal, one presents a set of slices, and the patterns of salience that your particular set affords is a matter of choice of presentational rhetoric—of reinforcing the main emphases you want to foreground in a representation of a particular kind of teaching practice, given what you as the portrayer think are the most fundamental aspects of that practice.)

At any moment in the practice of teaching all of the UES website prototype dimensions are in play at the same time—Planning, Environment, Experiences (for students), and Representation (by students). It is this very multidimensionality of complex teaching practice that makes really good teaching so hard to think, to do, and to portray. For example, in the teaching of the physics of matter, if a teacher has arranged for a child a firsthand experience of qualities of matter in its solid state (rough, smooth, heavy, light) there needed to be planning of those experiences (related to content standards, with a particular experience sequenced in relation to prior and successive experiences of the students). The physical environment needs to be arranged so as to accommodate students’ having such firsthand experiences of qualities of matter—physically there must be places on tables or on the floor for children to gather and handle smooth stones and rough ones, smoothly sanded blocks and rough pieces of wood, etc.) Socially, the environment needs to provide arrangements for the experiencing—individually, or in pairs of students alternating turns at observing and handling objects, or in small groups in which the turn taking patterns are more complex. At the same time there must be multiple symbolic/semiotic ways provided for children to represent their understanding of differing qualities of matter—talking, writing, drawing, modeling in clay, and the like. Let me repeat—at any given moment all these aspects of practice are in play at the same time. The interconnections across different dimensions of teaching practice are a bit like what’s shown in the nursery rhyme “This is the house that Jack built”—many parts constructed in sequences, all the parts together making up a whole. How do you show this to someone who has never seen such practice before—or attempted to try it for herself? Representing complex teaching practice seems to be a daunting task indeed, even with the affordances provided by multimedia.

To summarize, in the whole of good teaching one doesn’t ever find instructional materials without there having been planning for their use. The materials are used in some particular student workplace physical environment, and use of the materials always happens within certain social arrangements for the conjoint actions of users. Student representations of their understanding as they engage the materials sensorially are continuingly being assessed by teachers, and such “proximally formative” assessment of student work during the course of its production informs mid-course correction (i.e. for immediate reteaching) as well as informing planning for future years. Given these multidimensional fundamentals, a website that emphasizes teaching as the construction and maintenance of an ecosystem of learning opportunity needs both to emphasize and provide informational detail on the various dimensions separately and also to continually point to the interconnectedness of the dimensions within the conduct of actual teaching practice.

And then after all that, there are the issues of what visitors do with a website. First, most visitors bring their own points of view about teaching practice. These “schemata”—sets of story-like expectations for what they will see—can drive what they actually see, especially in viewing relatively unedited video clips. I have written about this elsewhere (Erickson, in press.) One of the things the organizers of the “Making Teaching Public” website discovered was that video is not veritas in any simple way. Viewers are interpretive—they construct what they see—there are no “immaculate perceptions.” But website designers cannot anticipate all the presuppositions and patterns of inference that viewers will bring to minimally edited footage. By contrast, in art cinema and in much documentary film, heavy editing guides the viewer to the perspective taken by the filmmaker. However, in a minimally edited video clip the audiovisual document itself does not lead the viewer by the nose to “see” what the maker of the video wanted the viewer to “see.” A website also cannot control the browsing of a visitor—ironically the open, non-linear access to information that the website provides cedes to visitors ultimate control over how much of the website they will actually see, in what series position, and how reflective or not their seeing may be at any given point in the website. In other words the website allows the visitor to be a very shallow tourist, or a deep-delving and critically reflective ethnographer—but the maker of the website cannot control (or fully anticipate) which kind of visiting engagement the visitor undertakes.

Let me add a last observation. Another feature that varies across the individual cases in this array is the quality of the video portrayal of classroom practice. Some of the shooting was done in a way that looks semi-professional while in other cases the videotaping was done in a much less fluid way. Regardless of the “smoothness” of the audiovisual record, however, there was a tendency for the camera to follow the source of talk (the speaker of the moment) rather slavishly from one moment to the next. This is done by zooming (in for a close up, out for a wide shot) and panning (from side to side as people walk across the room, or as speakers and listeners alternate). It is what amateur camera operators usually do in making “home movie” style video footage. But it is wiser to err on the side of holding the camera more still, shooting in a way that intuitively feels slightly too wide so as to leave space for those in the frame to move out to the edges without leaving the frame, and showing as much as possible of the bodies and faces of those engaged with each other in face to face interaction. Groups of persons engaged in interaction have the character of a single highly magnified amoeba on a microscope slide—as the group moves through space the camera follows them, keeping the whole “amoeba” in frame as much as possible. This approach is especially hard to stay with in videoing whole class discussions—the temptation for the camera operator is to let the camera flit from one talking head to the next. However that way of filming fails to show the integrity of the interactional event as a whole—with the consequence that a viewer’s understanding of the organization of the videoed event can only be fragmentary and incoherent. Camera people who are learning to document classroom interaction for coherence and cogency in the audiovisual record need to keep this in mind—stay with the continuity of interaction as you see it, resisting the temptation to zoom in on attractive faces as that face is speaking. Keep your shots a little wider than feels intuitively comfortable, and don’t move the camera much. In other words, try as much as possible, and as continually as possible, to show what the listeners are doing while the primary speakers are talking.

That approach to shooting drives professional videographers crazy—it violates their aesthetic sensibilities as film-makers. It does not produce dramatic close-ups of interesting—and cute—faces (something professional film production people seem to think that viewers need in order to watch classroom footage with interest.) But humbler, more continuous shooting produces video records with minimal “camera editing” (zooming and panning), and such video records work better as a source for clips in cases of the kind we see in this website. (For example, shooting over the teacher’s shoulder so you can see the facial reactions of a set of students as the teacher talks can be very illuminating, or shooting from the side so that you always see some of the listeners and their reactions while a speaker is speaking to them. Those are technically simple ways to produce a more audiovisually coherent video account of the interaction you want others to see and to think about.) Sound is another story, and space constraints prevent me from elaborating here. But a couple of good quality wireless microphones, to be placed on students or the teacher, and a camera-mounted shotgun (directional) microphone can produce sound that, while not of professional quality, allows you to record talk clearly while shooting at some distance from those who are speaking.

To conclude, if you should be trying to build a website yourself, by all means emulate the various ways these materials that portray teaching were organized as multimedia arrays in “Making Teaching Public”—and don’t push too soon for a “one frame fits all” scheme for different home pages. There are distinctly differing kinds of teaching, within and across subject matters, classrooms, and schools. We can well afford at this exploratory stage to let a thousand flowers bloom in ways of organizing the disparate kinds of information that are collected in a website case. The individual teachers who contributed audiovisual portfolios of their practice to this website and the organizers of the website overall are to be commended for a wonderful contribution to what Lee Shulman has called “the scholarship of teaching.” It advances significantly our capacity to make teaching more public, even as we are aware that these efforts are only a beginning. Thanks and laurels to all those contributors and to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which has supported this effort in so many ways.

My closing admonition is—as interesting as the video clips may be to you, don’t imitate the way the video footage was shot here, for the most part. Be more holistic and less fragmentary in your shooting—keep a frame around the whole amoeba—the full set of persons who are interacting in a teaching/learning exchange, listeners and speakers together in the frame—and once you have found your amoeba keep the camera on it, as a long default shot, zooming in only very occasionally to capture some detail, such as writing on the board or on a student’s paper. If you should need to do that momentarily don’t stay there--zoom right back out. (And remember also that it is easy now to make digital still photos and edit them into your video clip—that is another way to avoid zooming in too much during the real time of shooting.) In the long run such continuity in audiovisual documentation makes for footage that is especially useful and appropriate for portraying the complexity of teaching.

References

Edwards, C., Gandini, L, and Forman, G. (1998) The hundred languages of children:
The Reggio Emilia approach—advanced reflections. Westport, CN: Ablex.

Erickson, F. (in press) Ways of seeing video: Toward a phenomenology of viewing
minimally edited footage. In Goldman, R., Pea, R., and Barron, B. (eds.) Video
research in the learning sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Jurow, S. (2003) Following kids, not scripts. Connections Winter, pp. 1, 4-8.
www.connect.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/index.html

Rosenthal, L. and Michaelson, A. (2002) Multiple representations aid children’s and
teachers’ work. Connections Winter, pp. 1, 4-8.
www.connect.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/index.html

An exhibition slide show and accompanying discussion (pdf) address 3 questions: