Within the international educational research literature, much of the focus has recently been upon teacher quality and the provision of competing models of teaching. As a result, there are major debates about equity with pleas to enhance the learning of students from lower resourced and disadvantaged backgrounds. Furthermore, teacher evaluation is also usually fragmented, summative, with little positive impact and is rarely attended to by teachers and educators. 

This symposium outlines a model of teaching and learning that embeds evaluation principles into the model of teaching and provides teaching analytics and feedback direct to teachers about their practice and impact, at the same time providing students with access to captions of teacher talk in real time: consequently providing an opportunity to enhance both teaching and learning. 

The Visible Classroom is a program that seeks to explore the potential of real-time captioning and transcription to facilitate the professional development of teachers and students’ engagement in learning. The pedagogical model is based on providing useful real time evaluative feedback for teachers, and fits with models of best teaching practice outlined in Professor John Hattie’s “Visible Learning” in Visible Learning (Hattie, 2009). In Visible Learning, Hattie notes that teaching and learning is too often hidden, characterised by high levels of teacher talk, but little reflection on the impact of teaching on students. The focus of the Visible Classroom program is the notion of embedded evaluation within the technology, in order to encourage teachers to critically assess what they have done and what their students have learned. The aim is that teachers can “see” their impact and make subsequent evaluative, evidence-based adjustments to their teaching to support improved student learning.  

The program was first piloted across mainstream schools in the United Kingdom serving primarily disadvantaged students, and was funded by the Education Endowment Foundation. This project aimed to counteract what Hattie terms the ‘hidden’ dimension of classroom practice (Hattie, 2009), by making what occurs within classrooms open for review and reflection. Hidden practice can be an impediment to feedback and reflection on teaching and learning, which are some of the cornerstones of effective teacher practice, and consequently, student achievement. One of the goals of this study was therefore to make visible the ways in which teachers’ planning and intentions are translated into action, within the complex environment of the classroom. The project sought to encourage teachers to move from summative evaluation of their teaching performance to more in-depth, real-time reflection and was designed to foster a mindset in participating teachers to engage regularly in critical reflection on their teaching goals and values, examine how their goals connect with their teaching practices and, ultimately, feel empowered to adapt their practice based on sound evidence. Further, the process of captioning teacher’s speech in real time and presenting this in written format almost instantaneously to pupils, was intended to provide pupils with several routes to learning. Based on the findings from a number of trials The Visible Classroom has been implemented in a number of contexts to support change specifically teacher education, access for students with some disadvantage teacher evaluation and instructional practice enhancement. The collation of the lesson transcripts, teaching analytics provides a large set that provides exemplars of teaching and learning. This symposium will provide an over view of the Visible classroom process as well as describing its impact in the context of change in instructional practice, supporting teacher education students and student perception. Finally the power of the 'big data' set will exemplifies classroom practice from a number of setting. The idea of an open sourced data set will be explored.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge: London and New York. Clinton, J., Brown, P.M., & Cairns K. (2013). Evaluation of the Victorian Deaf Education Institute Real-Time Captioning Pilot Program – Final Report. A report commissioned by The Victorian Deaf Education Institute. The University of Melbourne: Melbourne Graduate School of Education Clinton, J., Cairns, K., & McLaren, P. (2014). Evaluation of the Victorian Deaf Education Institute Real-Time Captioning Pilot Program. A report commissioned by The Victorian Deaf Education Institute. The University of Melbourne: Melbourne Graduate School of Education