Visible Classroom

Intervention description

Visible Classroom aims to encourage teachers to reflect on their teaching and develop their classroom practice. Every term, primary school teachers record their normal lesson practice, and upload audio files through a mobile app. After every upload, trained captioners provide teachers with a verbatim transcript of the teacher’s talk, plus simple analytics (e.g. speed of instruction, quantity of teacher vs student talk). After several hours of lessons have been uploaded, teachers receive a more detailed report identifying areas for improvement in their teaching, based on their self-selected teaching goals and the evidence from their transcripts. Teachers discuss the feedback with a mentor – another teacher at their school. Visible Classroom is based on research from John Hattie and the University of Melbourne Education Institute.

Technology

The intervention works through a mobile app available from the App Store or Google Play. Teachers then record lessons using the in-built voice recorder and upload recordings using the app.

Evidence Summary

The Education Endowment Foundation recently ran a project investigating the feasibility of Visible Classroom, which found that the approach is feasible and has the potential to make an impact on teacher practice that may lead to benefits in pupils’ learning.

Key research

A further Education Endowment project is underway to investigate the effectiveness of Visible Classroom. The evaluation report should be available in summer 2019

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/the-visible-classroom/