"Umm...uhh" — Lessons from making my own teaching videos

"The ... umm ... ahh..."

I cringed as I watched a video of myself introducing my course this semester. 

Last week I began making teaching videos to supplement my online classes. Having read the benefits of allowing students to access course content asynchronously and reserving live class time for activities that we can only do together, I was keen to start creating videos that students could watch outside of class.

My first video was a disaster. These were my thoughts as I watched:

I'm not speaking fluently at all! 

Do I always say "OK" this much? 

There's another "um"

Do I really look like that when I'm teaching?

There was a LOT of room for improvement.

In my second video I decided to write out a nice script so that I would be able to speak smoothly and avoid those vocal fillers. But this time as I watched the results I did not look confident in what I was saying because my eyes kept having to leave the camera to read my script. And even when I didn't film my face, my voice had that unmistakable "reading" quality--I didn't sound natural.

I realised I need to practice. That's what I keep telling my public speaking students. So I should probably take my own advice. And I did practice. I practised those videos several times until they were clear and not distracting (but also not perfect).

The experience made me think about my own teaching. How well do I convey ideas and instructions in class? Do I need to practice more? I came across this article which made me think about teaching in a way that I hadn't before. To become good at something (like acting or a sport) requires practice, but how often do we teachers actually practice teaching? 

"Every other performance profession prepares people by practising and breaking things down into sections," Doug Lemov says in the article. Yet professional development (at least in my experience) often gets us to think about ideas rather than actually giving us a chance to practice these things before we get in front of the students.

In my first ever teaching job I taught the exact same lesson 13 times each week--to 13 different classes. By the fifth repetition I was starting to go a little crazy. But I have to admit I really improved my delivery of each lesson each time I taught it. (I just feel sorry for the first class who suffered the worst lesson every week...) Looking back, it was a very good experience for me as a new teacher. I got to practice the same thing again and again and improve myself.

I still need to practice, as my dismal video efforts showed me, and making these videos gives me a great way to practice and see my progress.

• Do you think teachers need to practice?
• Have you ever made your own teaching videos? What was your experience like?
• What areas of teaching do you want to improve right now?