Complexities and opportunities in teachers' generation of videos from their own classrooms

Video cameras have become smaller and increasingly embedded in our social lives. This study investigates the implications of these changes for teachers' work with video in professional development. Specifically, we focus on complexities and opportunities associated with teachers generating videos from their own classrooms, in the context of a short online course where teachers tried several mathematical activities that invited student reasoning and discussion. We unpack the potential affordances of video generation for teacher learning by examining teachers' processes — how they captured video during instruction and selected clips to share — and the characteristics of their final video products. Analyses demonstrated that generating video clips was complex work for teachers, requiring coordination of multiple sets of considerations about their students, the video itself, video viewers, and the course. Further, capturing and selecting sparked different emphases for teachers. While capturing, teachers foregrounded video quality considerations while seeking to support students' experiences. Selecting engaged teachers in curating (and hence attending to) student thinking within their videos. Teachers' video products also demonstrated characteristics known to be supportive of teacher learning. We see these results as cause for optimism about the potential of teachers' video generation for supporting teacher learning.