K–12 | Daily Report

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No kid will be safe slacking off in the back of the classroom if a new type of video camera invented by Teachscape, a San Francisco-based company, makes its way into California classrooms.

It's a camera called Teachscape Reflect that takes 360-degree video images of a classroom, and is intended to help improve instruction and evaluate how effective teachers are in reaching all the students in their classrooms.

Mark Atkinson, Teachscape's founder and chief creative officer, says the camera will "revolutionize the potential for teacher improvement."

"What does it look like when kids are passionate about learning?" Atkinson asks. "These things can only be done on film." 

The camera is an outgrowth of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Teachscape, a for-profit company, is a lead partner in the initiative, and the camera was developed with financial support from the Gates Foundation.

The camera is able to record not only what a teacher does in front of the classroom, but also how children are responding to what they are being taught. Using software developed by the company, the video can be viewed on online, with viewers able to pan all around the classroom. 

Here's the Gates Foundation's description of the project:   

One of the most difficult challenges ... was to find a way to observe more than 20,000 lessons at a reasonable cost. Videotaping was an intriguing alternative to in-person observations, but the project had to overcome several technical challenges: tracking both students and a non-stationary teacher without having another adult in the classroom pointing the camera and distracting children, sufficient resolution to read a teacher’s writing on a board or projector screen, and sufficient audio quality to hear teachers and students. The solution, engineered by Teachscape, involves panoramic digital video cameras that require minimal training to set up, are operated remotely by the individual teachers, and do not require a cameraperson.

Teachscape officials reject the notion that the camera's all-seeing eye could be used against teachers who happen to have difficult, unruly, cranky, tired, or distracted students who don't pay attention to them.  

"The only person who has access to the video is the teacher, who can decide how or if it's shared," Teachscape's Matthew Nathan told California Watch. "The point is to show teaching as it is, in all its diversity."

But, said Nathan, how a teacher engages students does say something about his or her effectiveness.  

"When students are goofing off in the back, how she preempts that behavior to keep everything on track" provides some measure of the teacher's abilities as well as being instructive to new teachers who struggle to engage distracted students. 

So far, the cameras have been mainly used in classrooms of 3,000 teachers who volunteered to be part of the Gates research project, with no California classrooms currently participating. (Participating districts are in New York City; Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, N.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Dallas; and Denver).

Chris Williams, the Gates Foundation's senior communications officer, told California Watch that the images captured by the Teachscape Reflect camera will be used only for research purposes. "The data will not be used to evaluate any individual teacher's performance," he said. 

But that might not always be the case. The camera is now on sale for purchase by any school district – at a cost of about $4,800 each, along with annual software licensing fees that range from about $65 to $140 per teacher, depending on the size of the district.  

That price could put the camera off-limits to many financially struggling school districts. At the same time, school districts are under pressure to come up with new ways to evaluate teachers, not just using student test scores, but also using less easily accessible measures, like how well teachers engage their students. 

"Imagine being able to catch every detail of teaching and learning, and then being able to review the captured material online anytime, anywhere, to assess instructional practices," reads the blurb on Teachscape's website. 

For some, that image will be a welcome one. For others, maybe not.