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Show, Don't Tell: Video and Accountability

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For centuries schools have used the spoken or written word to assess how a student is doing, regardless of what has been taught. Think of chemistry classes: Hours of work in the lab must be boiled down to a two or three page lab report to get a grade into the book. Across the curriculum, it's whether students can write about what they did that matters, not how well they actually did it. It's not just school either; if we look at how we certify doctors and teachers, we'll see an enormous emphasis on written tests. Too often even writing isn't required. I sure hope airline pilots need to do more to get their licenses than fill in ovals on a multiple-choice test.

I recently attended a conference held by the Coalition of Essential Schools to select schools that could be considered exemplars of reform. About 50 people went through a variety of workshops trying to figure out what should characterize such model schools. I decided to count the number of times somebody said, "I want to see it," or, "Show me what it looks like." Everybody was talking about what these schools might look like, but when it came to how schools would be selected, it was a different story. "We should write ethnographies about them," somebody suggested. "Schools should submit written documentation as proof of their status as an Essential School," somebody else said. Written documentation was the way people were going to see the school and understand how it functions.

Prior to the meeting, participants were asked to read a 25-page ethnography of one school to discuss whether and how it could be called an Essential School. The study was wonderfully written, and I enjoyed reading it, but I strongly questioned if this should be the only way to present such documentation. Herein lies the problem: People want to see it, and writing alone can't show a school.

Seymour Sarason, in his Letters to a Serious Education President, writes:

"I and others can talk and write endlessly about what classrooms are and should be..., but we are using language as a way to engender what we hope is appropriate imagery. Whatever the power of language in this regard, it lacks the concreteness and compellingness of seeing."1

But there is another way of seeing. If used correctly, it allows schools and school people to be seen performing, and allows the viewers to make up their own minds. This medium shows--not tells--what school is like. I'm talking about video, and the people to control and produce it should be the educators and students themselves. In this paper, I discuss how video provides another way of seeing schools. Video, in conjunction with written documentation, can present a clearer picture of what is really going on in schools, and can become a dynamic tool for accountability.

Writing, Video, and Accountability

Remember the old saying, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear"? How much of what we read about schools should we believe? Of course, video, like writing, has pitfalls that must be addressed. But before we take up video, let's examine how writing fosters accountability. Or does it?

I've described writing as primarily "telling." Those of us who visit schools regularly have all experienced reading something about a school, then going there and seeing the school very differently. This is as much a fault of the medium as ot the schools. Consider how often these accounts of schools are narrated by one "voice," the writer's. This makes for good stories, and good writers get their point across, but it does not mean that what they present is the whole story, or even the real story. It is only rarely that writing about schools incorporates multiple voices (teachers, students, visitors) talking about the same thing. Instead, the writer makes all the selections and frames it--in other words, telling the story.

On first thought, video would appear to be very different: The camera never lies. But video too often falls into the same traps, in part because many who go into video are writers first and lack a visual creativity. Their purpose is to report, or tell, a story rather than let the story tell itself.

When, for example, we watch the TV news, we are seeing someone tell a story with a barrage of what I call "moving video slides"--10 to 15 second clips of an event taking place with a voice-over by the reporter covering the story. The writer is the one actually telling the story by selecting and manipulating the pictures we see, and by telling us what we are seeing. An extreme example of the writer's control over what we see came when NBC rigged the explosion of GM pick-ups in crash tests. Contrast this with the amateur video of the Rodney King beating, which allowed Americans to make up their own minds about what happened.

In the last decade, nature shows on TV have become more authentic, and, at the same time, extremely popular, because biologists have taken over the production responsibilities for the shows. They could do this because the technology is now easier to use and lighter in the field. The result is nature through the eyes of the biologist, not the TV producer--"nature in the raw...animals doing what comes naturally."2 Why not show schools through the eyes of educators and students?

Today's video technology is within the reach of anyone who wants to learn to use it: Teachers, students, and administrators have the power to control what we see about their schools. Generally when you see a video on education, it has been produced by people who know little about schools. They tend to cover schools the way they cover other stories: brief video clips with voice-overs, only rarely showing any depth. Instead, it is the educators themselves who should produce the videos, not just because they're in the schools already, but because in doing so they become accountable for what they present.

Video as Exhibition: Three Functions for Accountability

Many Coalition schools have adopted the principle of "graduation by exhibition": that students, rather than just accumulating the requisite number of credits, need to demonstrate what they know and can do in authentic, public ways in order to graduate. Joe McDonald has described three basic functions of the exhibition as follows: 1) it "faces outward," bringing student performance into the open for public examination; 2) it "points inward," helping the school to see better the operation of its own systems by the light of the learning outcomes these systems produce; and 3) it "presses deeper," moving learning toward genuine understanding even while assessing it.3 Taken together, these three functions of an exhibition represent crucial components of a school's accountability system.

Video can be considered part of a school's exhibition, and as such it supports each of the three functions described above. I'll take up each in turn, looking at how video: 1) faces outward by communicating the school's performance to the community; 2) points inward by helping the school develop a reflective capacity and by providing something upon which to reflect; and 3) presses deeper by capturing student performance in ways that document growth of

Facing Outward: Communicating Out

When we began the "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" tele-workshop4 at Thayer, we had in mind a kind of C-Span for schools, which would allow viewers to see the process of schooling in depth, both the successes and the failures. Give people enough information, we thought, and let them make up their own minds. By doing so, we would be asking schools to become publicly accountable for these processes, thereby encouraging them as well to get better.

In the early stages of "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" we thought that participating schools might develop video portfolios to document their change process. Taking video, archiving it, and then putting it together topically-for example, by the nine Common Principles of the Coalition--would yield a powerful account of how a school is changing. Schools could then share their stories with others, learning from and contributing to others. The video portfolios might serve two accountability purposes: 1) to foster the development of reflective capacity for staff and program development within the school (more about this later), and 2) serve as a means for the school to communicate out beyond its walls.

We often talk about "stakeholders" in our public schools-- parents, businesses that may employ graduates and colleges that may admit them, state and district education authorities, and the taxpayers who pay for the enterprise. What do they know about what's going on in schools, and how do they know it? Schools are like a black box, from which emerge only transcripts, test scores, letters of recommendation, an occasional local news story (often only following an "incident"), and rumors. Video holds the key to opening up that box.

More and more school districts now use local or educational access channels to show the community what is going on in the schools. For example, since 1971, the Salem, New Hampshire, school district has broadcast over Channel 30 a variety of student presentations and projects, such as "A Celebration of Inventions" and seventh grade interactive video projects. Television also helps the district to involve parents in their children's education through programs like "Tell Me a Story" and "Helping Your Child Enjoy Reading." Informational programs, such as school board meetings and Chapter 1 introductory videos, are also broadcast. The medium is controlled by the educators and meets the specific needs for information of the community. Its effect has been to open up schools to the community--the essence of accountability.5

As a teacher, I have used video often to present student work to parents. When parents see the work their children are actually doing, they are able to make up their own minds about it. In my experience, parents are most often impressed by the variety of skills the students are learning, and many are moved by what they see. Some who were initially skeptical about the kinds of projects we are doing have become supportive of them.

On "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" we regularly air videos from participating schools on topics ranging from assessment to scheduling. These videos allow teachers and administrators to see what's happening in other schools without having to visit, which is a great resource, but is often limited by time and cost. In the future, Thayer and other schools with innovative programs might be portrayed in a "digital school profile." This profile would incorporate video, along with text, graphics, and audio, into a multimedia computer document presenting valuable information about the school in an easily transportable, user-friendly format.6

Pointing Inward: Building Reflective Capacity Within the School

Video changes people's behavior. I wonder how many students have been encouraged to write using a computer by watching the TV character Doogie Howser write in his electronic journal at the end of each show. I know that after the TV movie on Thayer, A Town Torn Apart, portrayed an advisory group meeting, I became more sensitive to my own advisory. What a powerful tool for changing practice video could be if exemplary pedagogy from schools were taped and broadcast.

Video can be equally powerful in changing practice within a school. To prove it, I'd like to tell a story about a video project we did at Thayer this past holiday season. One day, unannounced, Dennis Littky, our principal, walked into every classroom and videotaped each teacher for five minutes. While every teacher cooperated, demonstrating the trust we have in Dennis, some teachers came to me later to ask, "What's he doing?" "I wasn't at my best," they'd say, or, "How's he going to use it?"

What Dennis and I were doing was putting together the first piece of Dennis' holiday present to every teacher, a customized copy of A Town Torn Apart. The first 15 minutes of tape before the movie presented Dennis, dressed as Santa, sneaking into the teacher's room at night and giving that teacher a personal holiday greeting in a quasi-evaluative format, describing the things he or she did for the school over the year and the areas in which Dennis saw growth. Next came a clip of Dennis and the teacher talking about the year so far. Finally, we added the piece from the teacher's class.

At our holiday party, we all got together and watched the tapes. Teachers were looking into each other's classrooms and commenting on what they saw--something very rare in American public high schools. I put together a brief feedback sheet to see how helpful these videos were for teachers and handed them out at our next staff meeting. Some teachers responded that they had never seen what was going on behind them in their classrooms, or that they had never known they had this or that mannerism. Seeing the video effected how they taught the next day.

Of course, not every principal could or should go into teachers' classrooms unannounced with a camcorder and start shooting. But every school can work out ways for teachers to see their own, and, eventually, each other's work on tape, and create a forum for talking about what they see. Video can become the basis for reflective capacity within the school. At Thayer, following the holiday tape success, I asked teachers if I could go into their classrooms once a month, again unannounced, and tape for five minutes on their personal tape, which then would be available for them to do with as they pleased. Over the course of the year, they would have 45 or 50 minutes of themselves on tape. Many responded that they would love to do this. This is a project we will begin at Thayer in September, 1993.

When "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" started, it was our intention to show not only exemplary practices in action, but also the real school context in which they occur. When I started to tape teachers and students, we ran into disagreements in the workshop's planning group about whether or not viewers would learn more from the mistakes than from the successes. We tried to capture the real thing and from that generate the workshops, with some interesting results.

During the "Student as Worker, Teacher as Coach" "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" workshop, Julie Gainsburg, a teacher at Thayer, invited participants to view her math class and discuss whether she was acting as a coach while teaching in the front of the room. Since there was no voice-over, only a real classroom situation, viewers had to decide for themselves. Julie learned a tremendous amount from the process. Furthermore, the feedback from that workshop suggests that not only the teacher whose classroom is presented benefits from reflecting on real practice. A teacher participating in the workshop who's been resistant to change said Julie's piece was the best staff development activity he'd ever experienced, because it was real and allowed you to make up your own mind.

It takes brave teachers like Julie to lead the way for other teachers to share their classroom work--and their students'--on video. How different would it have been if Julie had written a paper about what she thought of herself as a coach in that situation? Schools need to create opportunities for teachers to see their own performance and their classes' privately, and, eventually, also in supportive forums of "critical friends." These kinds of forums lead not only to changes in individual teacher's practice, but also in the culture of the school.

The same opportunity for reflection exists with student performance. On the most recent "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" Kristine, a Thayer student, gave the oral presentation part of her Senior Exhibition project. As Kristine is interested in a career in communications, her "essential question" was: Does the media shape society or reflect it? For this workshop, we had a panel of judges consisting of a student and teacher from another high school and myself. Participants at all the sites were asked to use Thayer's criteria to assess her performance. They were invited to call in and explain their scoring. Kristine loved the experience, and the staff gained valuable feedback on how we assess exhibitions.

In similar fashion, Linda Nathan, Co-Director of Fenway Middle College High School in Boston, brings video of her students' exhibitions when she does workshops for schools. After showing the videos, Linda asks teachers, "Is this good enough? Do students have the skills and knowledge they need to get to the next step?" Discussions among teachers tend to be deep, because they are able to make up their own minds about the students' performances. The experience benefits both Linda, who gains perspective on the exhibition's design and her students' performances, and the workshop participants, who gain insight for developing exhibitions for their schools.

These uses of video can enhance reflective capacity within one school or within a cluster of schools. Though we often have the same students as other teachers in the school, we rarely look at and discuss their work collectively. The videotaped exhibition affords the opportunity to see what kind of graduates we are producing, and, from that vantage point, examine the school's systems for helping students get there.

At a staff meeting, we viewed Kristine's performance again, this time with the goal of giving teachers a chance to develop standards and reflect on how this might effect their own classroom activities. At Thayer, we tape all our senior exhibitions. One goal of this documentation is to reflect on whether we are truly assessing students on the 19 graduation skills we have developed as a staff and whether students' work has the depth and breadth we value.

Pressing Deeper: Capturing Real Learning

The third component of accountability deals specifically with student performance and how we assess it. As I've written, schools are used to evaluating students' work based on written, and more rarely, oral performance. These kinds of assessments tend to be summative: the lab report, the research paper, the paper-and-pencil test.

When we use video to create longitudinal studies of student learning, they yield interesting results. In this regard video reflects the way writing is frequently taught--though not always assessed--these days: as a process. When I taught writing, I would always show my students the letters Tolstoy and Ghandi wrote to one another. The writing is messy and full of changes, with words scratched out and new ones inserted all over the place. This is what writing and thinking really look like--revising words and sentences mirrors thinking. But books never show us the messiness, and this can be misleading and intimidating to students.

Video also shows thinking. When you tape someone at work, you tape the mistakes and the successes, something polished writing and professionally made videotapes generally lack. The mess is what shows process and progress, and making progress is what education is all about. When we put too much emphasis on the product, we may be losing our best evidence of real learning the progress.

We are already familiar with television programs that present process as a means of learning as well as entertainment--This Old House, which teaches about home restoration by following an actual project, and the Lifetime channel's medical series, which shows actual operations being performed while the doctors explain the procedure. These shows capture real thinking and learning in the construction and medical professions--why not such process-driven programs for education?

For our "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" workshops on "Teaming" and "Integrating Curriculum," we decided to tape our seventh grade team at Thayer. Using the Foxfire approach, the teachers decided to let students develop some of their own essential questions and projects that would integrate math, science, English, and social studies. I taped students as they developed questions. A month later, I taped the same students as they worked on the questions. When we viewed the tapes, teachers were, in Stephanie Brodie's words, "overwhelmed and mesmerized" by the sophistication students demonstrated, an observation they might not have made without the opportunity to see the process rather than simply the product of students' work.

As Collins, Hawkins and Frederiksen have described, we can't "reconstruct" a student's abilities from just one source. With more ways of looking at a student--video, written logs, self-evaluations, etc.--we get "a much richer notion of what a student's abilities are. By enriching the way we assess students, we will enrich the way we educate them."7 At Brooklyn Technical High School, students working on collaborative design projects are assessed on written group and individual logs, the presentations, and the videos of both process and product. With these multiple measures--three out of four of which are process-oriented--teachers have a much better picture of the depth of each student's real learning.

Videotaping students over their school career--giving exhibitions, collaborating with other students, participating in school meetings, etc.--provides a picture of change and growth, and offers a powerful vehicle not just for assessment, but for students' reflection on their own learning. When students see themselves learning--and we show them that we value that process, not just the grade--they become more accountable. I think of the movie The Sting in which Paul Newman and Robert Redford are much less interested in the money than the process of putting together and pulling off the "perfect con." The whole movie is really about education, even if it is a con artist's.

Conclusion

Accountability is inseparable from standards. Sizer, McDonald and Rogers have written that standards, in whatever criteria or rubrics they are expressed, "come to life in the face of performance, then fade in clarity and power as images from the performance fade."8 That's true of standards for students, teachers, and schools. Video is probably our most effective tool for keeping performance alive, without which standards whither to meaninglessness.

I'd like to return to the experience of broadcasting one girl's exhibition on "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere." Groups of school people gathered in approximately 400 sites to watch Kristine's performance, then assess it. A national discussion of viewers concerned with education followed. We all left the workshop more informed about what kinds of standards we should attach to performance. While I'm not suggesting every student's work should be subjected to this kind of public scrutiny, or anything like it, I will say using video to bring real student work out of the "black box" of the classroom raises important questions about accountability for student, teacher, and school performance: Is the student accountable? Her teachers? The school? The community? To all, I'd answer: You Bet! The sooner we start talking about the implications of that accountability, the sooner we'll have the schools we want. Video, if it's real, taken together with writing and other documentation, can furnish the raw material that allows people to make up their own minds. Only from that point can we refashion our schools to become truly accountable.

Appendix A: Technical Requirements

What follows is my list of minimum requirements for a school to take video of adequate quality for the purposes I discuss in this paper. Of course, if a school has the resources, it can buy much fancier equipment and expect better results. I'd estimate normal start-up costs at about $5,000.

• Camcorder. A school needs a camcorder that shoots well in low light (5 lux or lower) because schools are in many instances poorly lit for camcorders.
• Audio. Without good pictures and good sound no one will watch your video. Since I have not found a camcorder that has a good microphone built in, I suggest you buy one. You should be able to get a good stick microphone for less than $200.
• VCRs and editing equipment. Camcorder salespeople may not tell you that to get your video into a presentable format you need to do some basic editing. Videotape is cheap, which is good because you can shoot almost everything, and bad because you'll need to do some editing if anyone's going to watch what you shoot. By buying compatible VCR's and attaching them to an editing controller, you can get glitch-free edits and sequence your segments.
• Videotape. You should be aware that each time you go down a generation you lose quality, but videotape is still a very inexpensive way to document your school. Be prepared to buy a lot and tape a lot!

Appendix B: Getting Started

Following are some suggestions of how video can be used by teachers and administrators to begin to enhance accountability in every school. Of course, once a school begins to use video for this purpose, it will develop its own most powerful uses.

• Tape presentations of your students and archive them on either class tapes or individual student tapes.
• Look at student performance longitudinally by recording students throughout the year and having teachers and students assess their progress over time.
• Tape your students working and reflect on the entire process of learning--not just the end product--for a better and more complete appreciation of student work.
• Use video to show parents, community members and others what and how the students are learning.
• Show younger students videotaped examples of what they'll be expected to do.
• Use tapes of yourself and students to generate discussions with fellow teachers about how aspects of your performance and class performance can improve.
• Have students keep their own video resume and documentation for student portfolios.
• Document the changes you are making in your school to develop a school video portfolio for the purposes of program evaluation and accountability.

Footnotes

1. Seymour Sarason. Letters to a Serious Education President. Newbury Park, CA: Corwin Press, 1993, p. 82.
2. Margot Slade. "Killers in the Mist: TV Nature Shows Grow Nastier." The New York Times. June 14, 1992, IV, 6:1.
3. Joseph P. McDonald. "Exhibitions: Facing Outward, Pointing Inward." Providence, R.I.: Coalition of Essential Schools, Studies on Exhibitions (no. 4), 1991.
4. "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere" is a monthly two-hour interactive tele-workshop broadcast live on satellite television. Each workshop concerns a different topic relating to school reform. For information, contact Elliot Washor, Project Director, Thayer Junior and Senior High School, 85 Parker St., Winchester, NH 03470.
5. For more information, contact Arthur Berlin, Salem High School, 44 Geremonty Drive, Salem, NH 03079.
6. The Coalition of Essential Schools has developed a prototype digital student portfolio, with the support of EduQuest and IBM, and will begin development of a prototype digital school profile in Fall 1993.
7. Allan Collins, Jan Hawkins, and John Frederiksen. "Three Different Views of Students: The Role of Technology in Assessing Student Performance." New York: Bank Street College of Education, 1991.
8. Joseph P. McDonald, Bethany Rogers, and Theodore R. Sizer. "Standards and School Reform: Asking the Basic Questions." Stanford Law & Policy Review, vol. 4 (Winter 1992-93), p. 30.

The Coalition of Essential Schools gratefully acknowledges the IBM Corporation and the UPS Foundation for their support of its research on Exhibitions.

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This resource last updated: June 03, 2002

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