A YouTube video club for teacher learning: Empowering early childhood educators to teach STEM

Abstract

A lack of evidence bridging the chasm between professional learning practices and commonly used, publicly available resources such as YouTube videos, remains a long‐term challenge in both research and practice. The study introduced a YouTube video club for female early childhood teachers in Hong Kong (N = 29) to view, analyse and discuss STEM teaching videos. The participants wrote reflections and discussed with peers to exchange views on teaching content and strategies. All participants completed pre‐ and post‐intervention surveys reporting their teaching beliefs, and five participants from the experimental group were invited for individual interviews. The questionnaire survey data were analysed using statistical analysis, while the interview data were analysed through inductive thematic analysis. The study, which was pre‐post quasi‐experimental, showed that the video club enhanced teachers' beliefs and attitudes towards professional practices in early childhood education. Qualitative analysis of teacher interviews revealed benefits and constraints of using YouTube videos for professional learning. The study transformed video clubs into a web‐mediated mode using YouTube, Google Classroom and Zoom. The results have implications for the design and implementation of video clubs in teacher learning programmes. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic As the largest and most popular video‐sharing service, YouTube hosts a wide range of freely accessible video types that can be used for professional education in various disciplines. There are worldwide efforts to improve early childhood teachers' ability to teach STEM. Video recordings of classroom observations have been used in the context of video clubs since the 1990s to support teacher learning. What this paper adds We introduced the design of a YouTube video club focusing on STEM teaching, in which the participants were asked to view and analyse video excerpts, write reflection as guided by the facilitator and discuss with peers in groups to exchange views on the teaching content and strategies demonstrated in the video excerpts. We extended prior research on video clubs by transforming video clubs into a fully web‐mediated mode using the technologies of YouTube, Google Classroom and Zoom. This design‐based study evaluated the design of YouTube video club in terms of affording and constraining teachers' professional learning in STEM education. Implications for practice and/or policy Results of this study can inform the design of teacher learning programmes using YouTube videos. YouTube videos can be used in web‐mediated video clubs to enhance teachers' professional beliefs, as well as the pedagogical content knowledge in specific learning domains (eg, STEM). More enhancements should be made to optimize the design of YouTube video club.