I take a deep breath and hit “play”. Here it is: the dreaded video of myself teaching.

As expected, I hate it. My voice sounds all wrong and some of my mannerisms and nervous “fillers” are utterly cringeworthy.

Luckily, I am not alone in my mortification. Almost all the participants in our video-coaching programme express a degree of embarrassment or anxiety about having their lessons filmed to begin with.

After the first couple of sessions, though, this feeling melts away. That’s when the sharp and practical coaching conversations can take place. Suddenly, the humiliation seems worth it.

Once you get over the embarrassment, the benefits of video coaching are clear. That’s why it is becoming an increasingly common practice in schools - you may even already use it. The question is: are you using it as effectively as you could be?

For several years, Torquay Academy has been delivering an incremental coaching model inspired by the Uncommon Schools network and advocated in books such as Get Better Faster and Leverage Leadership.

Every member of staff is already coached every week. Coaching is by far the greatest investment we make in our staff from a CPD point of view. This has built a strong culture of continuous improvement and teacher reflection, and video coaching is a key part of our model.

When you are being coached in a sport, feedback is often live and immediate. In teaching, however, coaching conversations rarely take place immediately after an observed lesson.

Teachers are busy people and coaching time is squeezed between lessons, marking and planning. The result of this is a delay between lesson observations and coaching conversations. Sometimes this is a delay of a few hours, but the two activities can be separated by a day or more - and that can make a big difference to the effectiveness of your coaching.

Having a video of the lesson offers a way around this. It provides an accurate record and helps to overcome the inevitable difficulties that teachers and coaches have in recalling precisely what was said and done, sometimes days after the fact. Video footage provides an objective record that can be used to lead discussion, helping to overcome any discrepancy between the perspectives of the coach and the teacher being coached.

When a lesson is being recorded, coaches don’t need to scribble down phrases or try to construct an approximation of what a teacher has said, because there will be a verbatim record to discuss. This makes it easy, for example, to focus on the language being used to tackle a behaviour issue, to consider the clarity of an explanation or to look at the “rollout” of an activity.

When done right, video coaching can be incredibly effective. But how, exactly, do you do it well? How do you incorporate it into your school’s CPD properly? I believe there are three key hurdles for leaders to overcome here.

Teachers don’t like watching themselves teach

As mentioned earlier, nobody likes watching themselves on film. Helping staff to understand the science behind this can assist in overcoming the initial cringe factor.

The problem is partly down to a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as “voice confrontation”. Usually, when we hear ourselves speak, the sound reaches us through the air, but it is also conducted through the bones in our face. As a result, we hear a much richer, deeper voice than those around us hear when we speak.

Voice confrontation effectively arises from the cognitive dissonance of hearing a more high-pitched and nasal voice than we were expecting. As teachers, we spend hours each day listening to our own voices, but the sound we experience is completely different to what our students hear.

This can be a real psychological barrier for some staff at first, but if the coaching is effective in driving practice forward - and staff understand what voice confrontation is and are prepared for it - these anxieties will soon fade into the background.

The cost of equipment

Once you have committed to trying video coaching with your staff, you will face the bewildering task of navigating the wide range of technical solutions to support it. However, these don’t need to cost the earth. There’s a well-developed market out there to suit all budgets. It ranges from simply pulling out a mobile phone or iPad, to purpose-built cameras and software, to a full-on “observation classroom”, kitted out with a camera in the ceiling and microphones.

Personally, I’m quite comfortable at the shoestring end of this spectrum. We simply use iPads mounted on a tripod to capture video. This gives us maximum manoeuvrability in moving between classrooms and capturing different angles when required: a teacher setting up a task; a group of students; a piece of student work.

It also means that a coach can maximise the use of their time. Within an hour, with one iPad, we can typically capture or review footage with three different members of staff.

The process can feel vague

In some ways, the conversation about how to capture and review video footage is a bit of a distraction from the real focus of the coaching process itself. Whichever route you go down, the footage is the footage. The really important question you should ask yourself is: what do I want coaches to be looking for when using video coaching? Video offers such a precise and accurate window into a lesson that this should be matched with an equally laser-sharp focus from the coach.

For example, at Torquay Academy, we use techniques from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion as a common approach to developing classroom practice. In preparing for video coaching, we spent a lot of time refining exactly what it was that we would see in the classroom if these techniques were being used to the greatest effect. From this we’ve developed a “coaching playbook”, which coaches draw on for clarity and consistency.

Other schools may have a set of teaching principles or teaching and learning priorities they can use to replicate this process. The key thing is that you are clear about what you are looking for when it comes to reviewing the video together.

We use a piece of software to “tag” the video footage as it is being captured, which makes it easy to navigate back to the aspects of practice we want to discuss later. You could achieve the same with a pen and paper - simply record the timestamps. This means that coaches don’t have to spend a huge amount of time reviewing video and planning feedback conversations, making the process more meaningful and efficient.

Harrison Littler is vice-principal for teaching and learning at Torquay Academy in Devon. He tweets @HarrisonLittler

This article originally appeared in the 17 July 2020 issue under the headline “Get ready for your close-up with these video coaching tips”