The importance and value of formative assessment for improving learning is widely accepted. This is true for student learning (Black & Wiliams, 2009) and for in-service teacher continued growth and development (Yorke, 2003).  Formative assessment with teachers creates opportunities for teachers to explore student understanding (Yorke, 2003). Such opportunities are centred on the idea of teachers as reflective practitioners, enabling them to better tailor their own teaching practice to make progressive improvements (López-Pastor and Sicilia-Camacho, 2017).  The bringing together of formative feedback and reflective practice is now well established as useful for teacher development, as is the use of video to support teacher reflection.

Video has been used in teacher education since the 1960s in a variety of ways. Examples include using video for lesson analysis (Santagata, 2014), for teacher professional development (Sherin, 2004), as a prompt for discussion between teachers (Borko et al., 2008), and to create professional learning communities (Sherin, 2004; van Es, 2012). Video can be viewed as both a ‘representation of practice’ and a powerful tool for the ‘decomposition of practice’, that is, breaking the teaching into parts to enable others or oneself to focus on particular elements (Grossman et al., 2009 p. 2064).  A key enabler of video as a tool for reflection in teaching is that enables the educator to become more analytical in their reflections. It does so by removing the cognitive overload of ‘in-the-moment’ decision making (Rich & Hannafin, 2009) freeing the educator to reflect on the teaching and learning interactions. This confirms Girardet’s (2018) finding that video reflection can support the development of both the analytical and reflective abilities of teachers.

In our research we bring together the elements of formative assessment, teacher reflection, and video as a tool for reflective practice to explore ways pre-service teachers (PSTs) can be supported to better understand their own practice (O’Keeffe & White, 2021, 2022).  Girardet (2018), among others, reminds that video observation of teaching practices (observation of oneself or others) can support the development of analytical and reflective abilities. Detailed and systematic observation of specific practices of the teacher in classroom promotes the development of the so-called ‘professional vision’(Goodwin, 1994), that is, the ability to notice and interpret significant features of classroom interactions.

While much video-reflection research to date has been conducted with ‘regular’ flat video, we use 360-degree video (Balzarettia et al, 2019).   We argue that 360-degree video mediates the process of teacher reflection more effectively than regular video because it provides greater capacity for the user (pre-service or in-service teacher) to focus and re-focus their reflection as needed (by panning around the screen/recording) while watching back or reviewing a recording. 360-degree video allows PSTs to experience video-recorded lessons from an immersive 360-degree perspective, providing a greater understanding of the entire context in which an interaction or an action is situated. For example, an interaction mis-remembered or not observed can be reviewed from multiple perspectives after the event —nothing is ‘off-camera’.

The PSTs who participated in this research are in their first semester of the first year of their teacher education program and in general have no formal teaching experience. As part of their course assessment, each student is paired with a pre-assigned partner to co-plan a mathematics lesson aimed at middle school students. Each pair then independently enacts the same element of their plan (usually the launch) to a cohort of their peers. These enacted lessons are recorded using 360-degree cameras, the recordings of which are shared with PSTs through a staged review and reflect process. In this paper we discuss a case study of one pair of students. We draw on their reflections of their own practice and that of their partner’s to form initial understandings of what the data means in regard to the following questions. 1. How can reflection on one’s own practice, using 360-degree video, inform one’s own future teaching practice? 2. How can reflection on a co-planner’s practice, using 360-degree video, inform one’s own future teaching practice? PSTs completed a post-reflection after each ‘teaching experience’. These reflections were analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). A key function of IPA is that the “overall outcome for the researcher should be a renewed insight into the ‘phenomenon at hand’ - informed by the participant’s own relatedness to, and engagement with, that phenomenon” (Larkin et al., 2006, p. 117). Hence, IPA was chosen as the intention of the research was to better understand the lived experiences of the PSTs, and IPA focuses on each case independently before seeking to identify commonalities across the data.

The initial data analysis points to the way video reflection supports PSTs to see their own development and growth as a teacher, demonstrating greater self-awareness of areas for further development. This self-awareness became more evident when they reflected on each other’s enacted practice. Using 360-degree video to reflect on their partner’s enacted lesson proved useful to both PSTs. Sarah (pseudonym) talks about trying to understand the approach her partner took. She described how they planned the same lesson together, but their enacted lessons were vastly different. When reflecting on what she learned about her own teaching from watching Jake’s (her co-planning partner) lesson she indicated that “merely giving questions to the students may not help in explaining the purpose. Calling students to the board may also help with improving learning” (which Jake had modelled). Similarly, Jake was also surprised that, despite planning with Sarah, his enacted lesson was very different, “It was extremely interesting to see how differently the same lesson plan was enacted ... the contrast in instruction style and structure helped me reflect on what teaching approach I feel is the best way for me personally”. Jake also offered an insightful reflection as to what he learned about himself as a teacher, “While watching my partners video, I was struck with the thought that, if I were a student, I would have had a better learning experience sitting through my own presentation. This is of course a biased view, but what I realized is that the model of teaching that I perform is based on, subconsciously, what I would want as a student. ….. I think what works for me would be a good starting point, being easier for me to plan and model, but I should be very willing to critically reflect and adjust for my students’ needs.”

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