Exploring self and peer-reflection through a video tagging tool for online and classroom-based lessons for EAP settings

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Education practitioners' advancement in the understanding of teacher professional development has resulted in an increased interest in the use of video in teacher training programmes for both in-service and pre-service teachers in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) settings. This is in line with an increase of the use of video in a wide range of educational contexts (Mann et al 2019). Alongside this growth in use, there has been a corresponding increase in tools which can be used for teachers to develop reflection and awareness of their practice.This project will investigate the use of a particular video analysis tool (VEO/ www.veo.co.uk) and its role in fostering dialogic reflection among EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers'. VEO is an innovative tagging tool. It is believed that the use of VEO can be valuable to several fields beyond teacher education, delivering scalable collaborative pedagogy to meet twenty-first century needs (Seedhouse, Miller & Haines, 2021). When using the tool, teachers tag key moments in videos that are then used as points for discussion and development. Such tagging can be a data-led reflective process which builds awareness over time. Moreover, video recordings of lessons provide the opportunity to replay, change focus and go over details that might not have been noticed in the complexity of the classroom environment (in real-time). Reflection through video can be supported by peer observation as it provides the chance for teachers to work together, share ideas and knowledge, and discuss their problems and concerns. However, engaging in Professional Learning (PL) online has faced some resistance from teachers due to their lack of time, technical knowledge, motivation, and burnout, among other challenges. Moreover, little is known about the role of online dialogic reflection of EAP teachers within a longitudinal design (Walsh, 2018); therefore, this project seeks to address this gap by exploring the dynamics of EAP teachers' self-review and Peer-Observation of Teaching (POT) over one academic year and how this gives rise to teacher development. To address the research focus detailed above, a design-based research approach within a longitudinal qualitative comparative case study (Yin, 2004) will be applied. This study aims to investigate how self-review of video-recorded lessons and peer observation of teaching within an online Professional Learning Community (PLC) (DuFour, 2004; Stewart, 2014) can improve teaching practice and foster dialogic reflection among EAP teachers. It will also see where the VEO tool is a key affordance in this process. Ten EAP teachers will be paired up to record, tag key moments using video-tagging software, and reflect on each other's lessons. Inductive thematic analysis and Conversation Analysis will be applied to the data set (transcripts from reflective sessions, participants' reflective notes, comments on the video platform, tagsets from the video-tagging software, interviews, and written self-reflection notes from the researcher). One benefit of the project is that the snapshot video recordings collected (around 60) that could be easily adapted for use in both initial and in-service teacher education. It will be part of the project to consider how a corpus of videos could be used in teacher development and there will be recommendations and suggestions for teacher educators, arising out of the project. This corpus of classroom recordings, together with the recorded reflections, is potentially an extremely valuable resource that could be developed and used both within and outside the University of Warwick. By using generated audio-visual teaching material, this project will serve to meet the needs of teacher education programmes (Sert et al., 2021), which rarely integrate such elements into their programmes.