Teacher Video Coaching, From Design Features to Student Impacts: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Video and coaching as vehicles for teachers’ professional development have both received much attention in educational research. The combination of the two, video coaching, where teachers watch and discuss videos of their own practice with a coach, seems especially promising, but there is limited insight into how the design leads to desired teacher and student outcomes through mediating enactment processes. This review systematically synthesized the occurrences and co-occurrences of video coaching design features, enactment processes, teacher outcomes, and student impacts as reported in 59 empirical studies. The literature corpus contained information on design features for all studies, but the video coaching enactment processes were described in only half of the studies. Altogether, the studies showed that video coaching can support some positive teacher outcomes, such as changes in pedagogical behavior, but evidence was not consistently reported for all types of outcomes. Few studies examined impacts on learners. Taken together, this review revealed important gaps in knowledge, which highlights the importance of paying attention to unpacking teacher learning processes.