Bea Taylor, Instructional Coach, Says Video Coaching Makes Life ‘So Much Easier’

Two years ago, Bea Taylor’s mother fell ill. Bea needed to travel from her home in Texas to Virginia to be with her.

But this presented a potential problem for fulfilling her duties as an instructional coach in the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Tyler.

She decided she would support her students from afar using video. Her initial system for video observation achieved the goal of observing the teachers, but it was very time consuming.

“Here’s what I was doing,” she said. “I was sitting there watching the videos and manually typing out transcripts with my feedback. And it was taking me like five and six hours to be able to type out a 45-minute lesson.”

Then, UT Tyler adopted Edthena.

“As soon as I saw Edthena,” Bea said. “It was like oh my gosh. Why didn’t we think of it first? Because it was everything. It was everything that I had been doing manually.”

We heard Bea’s story when we connected with her to chat about her experience using video as an instructional coach. Bea said that in the years that have passed since the university adopted Edthena, the amount of time she has to spend ensuring her teacher candidates receive high-quality feedback has dramatically reduced.

“I knew right away it was gonna be a game-changer,” she said. “Because I knew how much time I was spending on what I was doing originally. Now I absolutely love it. It makes life so much easier for me.”

In addition to making her life easier, Bea also suggested that Edthena has improved the coaching and feedback she’s able to provide.

“When I evaluate students in person, there’s so many things that I can’t catch. And before I had no record of that. But now I can go back to Edthena when I’m trying to do evals, and I can push a button and go back exactly to where I want them to see. And if I’m doing an in-class evaluation, sometimes I’ll miss something.”

Bea’s interview is the latest in our Teacher Voices series. To watch the previous installment of Teacher Voices, click here.