TEAM REFLECTION: What we found is that we are much more comfortable sharing natural day-to-day classroom struggles with each other, a team of colleagues united with the aim of becoming better teachers and increasing student engagement, than we were with strangers walking into our class for 5 minutes at a time who would then drop us a piece of paper in our mailbox telling us what we did that was good or bad.

We genuinely want to improve our teaching skills and see our students succeed, and we genuinely want to help each other as colleagues and peers achieve this goal. This leads to a different climate of professional development with a teacher-ownership that can be very effective. Our TIIP team of teachers have been supporting each others' classroom; we allow each other see both our great shining moments of teaching but also seek out moments on video to share with each other that expose moments in question, or even moments of seeming failure.

Though we have not "failed" at teaching, we believe we have a higher potential to learn if we are watching ourselves and each other in both strong and weak moments and collaborating within the safety of our team in ways to bring about higher levels of student engagement and success

LEANCE IN A CLASSROOM EXPERIMENT

This form of video peer analysis was in part inspired by an article found in January 2011 Education Week's on-line magazine "My Students Help Assess My Teaching." We have since brought students into our discourse about successful teaching on our campus.