Introduction

The aims of the book are

to provide an up-to-date account of the special opportunities offered by digital video for raising the quality of teaching and learning through teacher competence development and

to draw lessons for practice from the relevant theory and research.

The audiences of the book are teachers, teacher educators, educational researchers and school leaders active in all forms of teacher development. The central concept of Visual Teacher Learning is introduced and defined as all uses of video representations of teachers’ interaction with learners and content for the goal of developing teaching competence.

To frame the book conceptually, it is argued why teacher development should serve quality learning and quality teaching, what these objectives mean and which quality standards preservice teacher education, alternative certification programmes and professional development should fulfil. Against this background, the Visual Teacher Learning model is introduced as a framework for understanding how video use can foster teacher competence development.

The introduction concludes with an overview of chapters: reviews of the research literature (Chapters 2 and 3); original research focussing on activities, processes and conditions needed for developing teaching and learning through video use (Chapters 4 through 6); recommendations for producing video and using it for professional learning and instruction (Chapters 7 and 8); and resources for practitioners summarising the lessons drawn from the preceding chapters (Chapter 9).