At the core of any effort to quantify and measure teacher effectiveness is a simple but powerful idea: teachers have the potential to impact their students' growth.  And, by extension, teachers who are reflective practitioners regularly measure their impact and, when necessary, retool their teaching. 

However, no matter how much teachers attend to learners and learning while teaching, and no matter how much feedback supervisors give them, reflection on practice usually relies on memory. Video is a tool that turns that around.  The analysis of video is ideally suited to supporting reflective, critical inquiry into teaching because of its stop, rewind, and re-view capacity and for the possibilities it opens up for seeing other teachers teaching.

Video is also unique in that it is the only means by which teachers can see their teaching through their own eyes. Video affords teachers the opportunity to engage in thoughtful, descriptive review of instruction, but only when it is carefully scaffolded.  In the words of the author, there is nothing quite as painful as watching oneself teach a lesson on video.  Consequently, the book provides a number of ways to lower teachers’ stress level and increase the possibilities of being able to benefit from the heightened attention to practice created by their self-observation. 

The book is designed for use by instructional coaches, teacher leaders, building-level administrators, and student teacher supervisors as well as by individual teachers who wish to promote their own professional growth.  While the featured protocols can be applied in all education setting, the second part of the book focuses on specific use cases including promoting teacher development, exploring specific Problems of Practice and evaluative uses.