Update - Ben Slavic

I am happy to report that in the past two days I have received via email five reports from the field from these people:

Kath (published)
chill (published)
jen (published)
Rita (published)
Chris Vancouver (in queue)

I’ve also received and published field reports recently from David Young and Bob Patrick. Many, for example the one from Chris Vancouver that just published, are highly informative on the level of pedagogy. This is what we need.

If you write more articles on pedagogy and advanced pedagogy I can shift my focus to making more videos for new people. We already have three books and seven years (3,965 articles and 22,765 comments) of blog/PLC activity – that should be enough stuff to read. It’s video time.

Why haven’t videos been our main focus so far? Well, first, it is our natural tendency to be stuck in our minds. That’s what teachers do. But, in the same way that we need to get out of our minds in our classrooms, we need to realize how much trouble videos of us teaching in our classrooms are to make – it’s almost impossible really and takes heroic efforts to get footage from just one class, with releases required and the carrying of cameras back and forth from home into our classrooms and other such bother.

And then there is the point – a very valid one – that our instruction is so much more badass with our kids when there is no camera lens looking at us, recording our every action. (It is that way with observations from administrators as well.)

So, although we have a lot of videos from past academic years here, I am suggesting that we punt on making classroom videos – we can still make and post them but we can’t rely on them for sharing training with each other, and start to make more videos like John made last week and John sent in last night, which I consider breakthrough videos for us (to emulate) in their format:

https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/08/19/grading-quick-quizzes/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/08/28/owi-video-from-james/

These short videos not made while we are teaching may convey less, but they are much easier to make.

Our new member Laura Censi is the one who provided the impetus for this change by sending her own report from the field about a week ago here:

https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/08/21/cwb-and-slow-friends-forever/

I thank Laura.

It’s going to be really weird to just film myself using John’s format as I just talk about CWB now, and maybe PQA and stories and shifting from PQA to stories and all stuff like that later in the year, and it may not even work.

But it is all I can think of right now to get this critical information, the details, out to new people because though words describe the bad, they don’t describe what’s in it. Not to mention that since our pedagogy is so body centered we need video to convey that body movement that makes comprehension based instruction easier and more real.

I am actually going to act like I have a class in front of me to try to convey the more subtle aspects of CWB to new people. I hope it works.