Improving self-reflection with video annotation. Evaluation of a new practice in teacher training

Increasing the quality of reflective practice in teacher training is a focal point in the current educational debate. A new opportunity has been opened up by the use of digital videos with video-annotation, a function allowing the user or others to add comments to the recorded videos of the lessons. In order to introduce this technology in teacher training to enhance teachers’ self-reflection, we need to know what affordances can be provided by it. The study compared three groups of novice teachers, who were asked to reflect on their own lessons under three different conditions: without any scaffold, with the scaffold of a question checklist, with the scaffold of a question checklist and a video-annotation tool. The data provides evidence that video-annotation can favour more analytic self-reflection but also shows critical elements regarding the persistence of that attitude over time.