A Preliminary Case Study of Promoting Teacher Professional Development via Post-Lesson Debriefing with the Support of Sokrates Cloud Services

Abstract

During the process of teacher professional development, debriefing serves as a critical element, which not only helps teachers reflect on their own teaching practice but also helps all peer teachers promote their professional development. A successful debriefing session requires teachers to recollect their experience of a taught lesson. The more details are recollected, the more issues will be identified, which, in turn, may enhance the effects of debriefing. In this vein, the authors develop a system, Sokrates Video Player (Sokradeo), which incorporates the abilities of automatic data collection and analysis, enhanced video player, and analytic dashboards to help teachers reconstruct their experience and identify critical issues of their teaching. A preliminary study was conducted to evaluate the effects of using Sokradeo to support post-lesson debriefing. Although the results indicated that Sokradeo might enhance the efficiency of debriefing and helped novice teachers master the use of smart classroom tools within a relatively short time, the study was not a well-controlled experiment due to the fact that the school schedule did not allow such an experiment. Hence, rigorous studies should be further conducted to investigate how Sokradeo contributes to the process of post-lesson debriefing.