Technology-enhanced video feedback - feedback that is relational, dialogic and engaging in nature, feedback that learners find prospective and actionable

Abstract

This study is situated within the context of initial teacher education at a university in Hong Kong. With undergraduates preparing themselves to be English teachers as the focus, the paper explores the effectiveness of the teacher educator’s use of technology-enhanced video feedback in supporting the student-teachers’ learning and development of their own feedback practices. Video feedback emerged as a new initiative amid the COVID-19 pandemic in response to students’ needs in the sudden shift to virtual learning. The idea was inspired by leading feedback scholars Carless, Stoakes and Moody (2020) who advocated video use as a powerful strategy to give the teacher stronger social presence, re-establish rapport with students and re-connect them as a learning community in an all-online environment. In this case, video feedback was integrated into a Pedagogy course not only to achieve the aforementioned goals but also to equip the student-teachers with the skills needed for a subsequent assessment task – to practice, reflect on and re-enact their own oral feedback. Data of the qualitative study was gathered through students’ written reflections from multiple sources, artifacts of their work and the teacher’s observational notes. Findings indicate the affordances of digital technology in enhancing the effectiveness of video feedback in promoting students’ learning. Students demonstrated a higher level of engagement with the given feedback and increased depth of reflections compared to when written and audio feedback was used. As students received the mid-course feedback with the help of technology, its prospective effect was evident. As Boud and Molloy (2013) assert, feedback “cannot be justified if there is no explicit expectation that it will be specifically used.” The study shows how impactful video feedback was on the quality of the student-teachers’ performance in their own feedback-giving as required by the assessment task and on how they perceive its role in their future teaching. How the assessment task design engendered “actionable” feedback (e.g. Malecka, Boud & Carless, 2020, Winstone & Carless, 2020) will be examined. While the findings reinforce the need for agentic student response (Mahoney et al., 2019), they also challenge the proposition that video feedback should be brief to minimise cognitive load. How the feedback on video is conceptualised by the teacher educator and strategically used by the student-teachers with diversified learning needs will be analysed. Implications on using video feedback when designing feedback processes in higher education in general and teacher education specifically will also be discussed.