Visible Classroom

Visible Classroom applies a systematic approach to providing formative feedback to teachers about their instructional practice.

Combining a range of innovative technologies, Visible Classroom allows teachers to receive transcripts from classroom lessons together with important metrics about their teaching.

Built on the principles of contemporary pedagogy, Visible Classroom enables teachers to review, analyse, and modify their classroom lessons based on objective evidence about their teaching practice.

Over time, this produces a repository of classroom lessons that is stored in a cloud-based content management system (CMS) and which is available to teachers for ongoing reflection on their work.

The Visible Classroom objective

By delivering classroom transcripts and teaching metrics, Visible Classroom provides an objective overview of actual classroom practices that offers real insight into teacher effectiveness. Feedback metrics, benchmarked against similar cohorts, indicate areas for future adaptation and encourage evaluative thinking so that teachers can consider their impact.

In these ways, Visible Classroom supports continuous teacher improvement that can influence learning outcomes for all students.

Visible Classroom also enables the teacher to store lessons, track progress, and assess the effectiveness of lesson modifications over time. It sheds light on such questions as:

  • Did the teacher allow enough time for students to participate in their own learning?
  • How much feedback did students receive?
  • Did the teacher speak too quickly or too slowly?
  • Were students responsive to some or all parts of the lesson?
  • How many questions did the teacher ask?
  • Was the teacher’s level of language appropriate for the students?

How it works

Visible Classroom is available as a smartphone or tablet app. It records teacher and student dialogue and can be incorporated into classroom practice.

The recording is uploaded to a remote site where it is transcribed and analysed before being released to the teacher, together with relevant teaching metrics. Transcripts and metrics are made available to the teacher through the use of Visible Classroom’s personalised dashboard.

A full report, developed by the Faculty of Education, that describes a pattern of practice benchmarked against an international database is also available, as well as resource links and suggestions to the teacher for improvements.

Conclusion

Visible Classroom draws on a strong evidence base. It uses technology to provide valuable feedback about each lesson that in turn enables teachers to critically assess what they have done and whether their students have engaged in the learning process. By utilising the power of feedback, it empowers teachers to be their own evaluator. It provides teachers with the necessary information to modify their teaching as required.

Visible Classroom was developed by the Faculty of Education in collaboration with Ai-Media and is part of the Graduate School’s educational software suite. Ai-Media is also the global distributor for the product.

Contact

For more information, please submit an enquiry.

Contact details for the relevant Faculty of Education staff members are also available in the Visible Classroom brochure (2.7mb PDF)