It might just have been because this was my first component, however Component 3 was by far my most stressful. I set goals of when I wanted my videos done that I just never seemed to meet, whether it was because the videotaping equipment didn’t work well, my lesson didn’t go as planned or because my students had way too much fun being taped. In the end, I finished my videos well into the spring and my written commentaries with about a week to spare. In each of my videos I had portions where I was leading large group instruction and portions where students worked in small groups or pairs. However, the focus of my videos was always to demonstrate what my students could do and I focused more on them than me in the videos. In the end, Component 3 was my best score of the 3 portfolio components and seeing as it is weighted the most, it took a lot of the pressure off future components. Below are some of my best pieces of advice, but as always, refer to the National Board’s website for official instructions.
Here are my suggestions:
- Hand out your student release forms the first week of school when students are already taking things home for parents to sign. On Component 3 I waited until later in the year to hand them out and it took me forever to get them back, but with Component 4 I handed them out right away and students brought them back much quicker.
- Make a clear lesson plan with learning goals so you can explain why you did what you did. Really consider how this lesson fits into your unit and year long goals.
- Videotape often! This way your students get used to it and will behave better when you tape for real. And who knows, you might actually use one of your practice videos.
- Use a lesson where you and your students are speaking in the target language. This was one of the biggest things stressed to me before taping and was something I held myself and my students to during videotaping.
Videotaping equipment
One of the biggest hurdles for me was how to get decent sound in my video. I tried so many things: a video camera and tripod, propping up iPads around my room, having a coworker follow me around….. however, each time the sound quality was poor and the video didn’t show very much of the class. In the end, I used a Swivl from the library and my iPad, which worked great! The wonderful thing about the Swivl is that it syncs to its microphone and then moves to follow it so the speaker is always in the shot. This way, the predominant sound in the video is from the microphone and you can always see who is talking. This brought up another issue though, how to get the microphone close enough to my students so they could also be heard? It was one of my colleagues that came up with the solution: hang fishing line from the ceiling and attach binder clips to the bottom so the microphone could be clipped in. By strategically hanging the fishing line over my grouped desks I was able to move the microphone around the room, leaving it above different groups of students. It worked like a charm! A word of caution though, it takes practice for you and your students to get used to this, so I recommend doing lots of practice videos.
For more information about written commentaries, see my Component 2 post.
Check out all my National Board Certification posts here.
