Seeing if teachers are improving their practice after receiving professional development is now easier with the new Comment Stats tool in Edthena, an award-winning video classroom observation platform for teacher development. This one tool transforms the data from comments left on teachers’ uploaded videos into a visual, data-driven way for them – and their coaches – to identify trends and determine if the professional development is improving teaching practices.

Using Edthena, teachers can upload videos of their classroom instruction and then share those videos with coaches and colleagues who provide timestamped comments. The comments are classified by four different types: questions, suggestions, strengths, and notes. With the new Comments Stats tool, the system automatically generates reports and graphs that show comments by their type and by any associated professional framework tags.

“Comment Stats enable teachers to reflect on the changes in their classroom teaching in new ways. Now teachers can look across all comments and reflect upon multiple videos at once to see trends in the types of comments they’ve received,” said Adam Geller, founder and CEO of Edthena. “And, as a coach you can look across multiple teachers at a building and determine if there are trends, such as meeting or not meeting a particular prioritized standards. Without Comment Stats, it would be hard to notice these patterns during the process of coaching individual teachers.”

The Comment Stats tool automatically collects the data from the comments thus not requiring any extra time or effort on the part of the user. The tool also works retroactively, so it will include already uploaded videos in the system-generated visualizations, such as line graphs showing comment data over time and pie charts showing comment data by percentages.

“In developing this tool, we reviewed different visualizations with our partner organizations to ensure we were providing an intuitive way for educators to use and analyze the data,” said Geller. “The Comment Stats tool allows comment data to be used in even more meaningful ways so educators and coaches can identify trends, lead professional learning conversations, and help improve teaching practices.”

Schools, districts, and teacher education programs in more than 30 states are using the Edthena platform. It helps these organizations make video observation an integral part of teacher induction, teacher mentoring, professional learning communities (PLCs), and peer observation.

To learn more about Edthena and its Comment Stats tool, visit https://blog.edthena.com/2016/09/08/comment-stats-surface-hidden-meaning-video-observation/.