Cayanna Good, Deputy Director of Innovation and Strategy for the Governor's Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) is trying to introduce a program that would allow video observation in classrooms across the state of Georgia.

“Georgia utilizes a contest called the Innovation in Teaching Competition, which began as part of a Race to the Top plan to recognize and reward Georgia teachers who embraced creative strategies in the classroom,” according to EducationDive.

“Taped video recordings of those high-performing educators is available on the Georgia Department of Education’s offshoot website GeorgiaStandards.org, so other teachers can watch and learn from their peers. The videos are supplemented with unit lesson plans and other resources.”

Miriam Greenberg, the project director at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, told EducationDive that the experimentation with video observation was introduced to see if it could simplify teacher evaluation.

After completing the Best Foot Forward study that included BloomBoard, Panorama Education, Pearson Education, Teachstone, thereNow and TNTP, according to the report, there was evidence that showed teachers were accepting when it came to constructive feedback. While this experiment proved to be insightful, there are some who believe that teacher observations don’t hold much potential for growth.

“A study from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the American Institutes for Research published in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis claimed that observing teachers in the classroom for the purpose of evaluation can ‘fail to meaningfully assess teacher performance.’ and that prior academic achievement by students is a better predictor of how well teachers are doing their jobs,” according to the report.

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Article by Navindra Persaud, Education World Contributor