Initial Study of Pre-Service Teachers' Comments on a Reality-Based, Urban-Student Video Streamed within an Online Course

The Master of Arts in Teaching program at Empire State College, an alternative teacher certification program focused on bringing career-changing adults to high-needs schools, has an important need in its initial pre-service year. These adult students must be prepared to move into complex, high-needs schools without student teaching and often with little direct exposure to best practices in an urban environment. In an attempt to bring more positive and productive “reality” into this pre-service year, urban K12 students were videotaped during a science workshop, then segments of this tape were streamed into the online segment of a pre-service course. Initial findings suggest that these 31 pre-service teachers benefitted from watching these videos that provided a rich, complex, realistic yet visionary scenario for analysis. These soon-to-be teachers then developed their own perspective on high-quality instruction. With minimal instructional prompts, these students were able to dig deeply into the activities presented, specifying engagement attributes, evaluating K12-student interactions, and drawing pedagogical conclusions. This article explains the video and its creation, the prompts that were used with the assignments, the resulting student commentary, lessons that can be learned from approach, and extended areas where these videos might be useful.