Video stimulated reflection and leadership development

This is an investigation into the use of interactive, online video capture platforms to support the professional learning and development of a community of educational leaders across a range of different settings.

The current COVID 19 pandemic has highlighted how we may need to anticipate and prepare for new ways of supporting professional learning and development in the future that potentially limits the need for travel and face-to-face contact.

Online learning currently being used and developed across a range of different sectors and settings has highlighted that there are existing but also new and exciting ways of working, which have had relatively limited application up to this point in the field of educational leadership due to a commitment to our natural preference for physical human interaction.

However, we are being asked to prepare for what is being described as a ‘new normal’ in education, as in all other aspects of society, because of the current pandemic.

This research aims to responds to this changing and unpredictable context by investigating the potential of interactive, online video capture platforms for the professional learning and development of leaders in education.

It seeks to explore how situated, contextual professional learning can be facilitated and supported across a community of practitioners through an online video capture platform, IRISConnect. It draws specifically on the concept of video stimulated reflection (VSR) to support educational leaders in different settings to capture, reflect on, share, discuss and evaluate a range of different types of leadership practice and to analyse these selected examples in alignment with their evolving professional narratives.

It builds on the use of digital synchronous and asynchronous learning that has previously been applied to support the analysis of teaching practice in various educational settings but also to support CPD and professional learning in postgraduate medicine/medical education, nursing education nationally and internationally.

It takes this type of approach to professional learning into the critical analysis of different strands of educational leadership by empowering the leaders themselves to take ownership of the process.

We hope our research will stimulate the development of a network of leaders from a range of contexts, engaged in their own reflective development.