In September 2019 I gave a presentation on the ViLLA project at the ZuS Innovation Workshop at the University of Cologne together with Daniel Zimmermann. This post is the blog-friendly version of that presentation — what ViLLA is, why video in teacher education is not as obvious as it sounds, and what the research actually showed. The project team at the time: Prof. Dr. Dr. Kai Kaspar, Prof. Dr. Johannes König, Charlotte Kramer, Marco Rüth, Daniel Zimmermann, Anne van Laak, and myself.

Project information and literature checked through 2026-07-11. Statements about the 2019 presentation describe the project at that time; they are not claims about current access, coverage, or funding.

The Problem With Learning to Teach

Here is the uncomfortable thing about learning to teach: for the first few years of your career, your primary research subjects are children. Every class you misread, every transition you fumble, every moment you lose the room — those are learning experiences, and the students in the room pay part of the cost.

This is not a new problem, and nobody is pretending it has a clean solution. But it raises a question that teacher education programmes have been grappling with for a long time: what parts of the relevant learning can happen before the student teacher is standing alone in front of thirty eleven-year-olds?

One answer — not the only one, but a defensible one — is: more of it, if you give people good video.

What ViLLA Is

ViLLA (Videos in der Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerausbildung — Videos in Teacher Education) is an online portal of real classroom recordings built for use in teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea was to film actual teaching, make the recordings searchable and pedagogically annotated, and give student teachers access to genuine classroom situations before they were responsible for managing one themselves.

This sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Filming real classrooms requires project- and jurisdiction-specific ethics, data-protection, consent or other legal-basis work, cooperation from schools, and attention to recording reactivity. The resulting videos need to be usable for instruction, which means they need accompanying material: lesson plans, worksheets, transcripts, annotations by subject-matter specialists. And then they need to be housed somewhere students can actually find them.

The first phase of ViLLA was funded through the University of Cologne’s Innovation in Teaching programme from April 2013 to December 2014. The university records the database opening on 5 November 2014. Its current project description identifies tagged classroom videos and accompanying material, with access restricted for legal reasons to people in teacher education; the specific size and availability of the 2014 collection should not be inferred from the current portal.

What the Research Showed

The project was not just infrastructure. From the beginning we ran research alongside the portal development — specifically, quasi-experimental studies on whether and how particular video-based interventions relate to the measured skills.

The target construct was situation-specific skills for classroom management — skills assessed through the study’s instruments for perceiving, interpreting, and responding to classroom events. Research on professional vision motivates that focus, but it does not reduce teacher expertise to one contrast between declarative knowledge and response speed.

The best documented result is Kramer et al.’s 2020 quasi-experimental pre/post study of 162 pre-service teachers. It compared video-based, transcript-based, and combined learning cases; within that study, the combined condition was the most effective for the measured classroom- management expertise. That is evidence about a particular intervention, sample, outcome measure, and comparison — not a demonstration that ViLLA generally improves teaching or that the infrastructure investment was thereby justified.

The transcript component is worth highlighting because it’s not obvious. You might expect that video alone would be sufficient — you are showing people real teaching. But the transcript creates an additional layer of access: learners can read back what was said, annotate, and compare interpretations. The 2020 result is consistent with the combined cases helping on its target measure; it does not by itself identify which feature of the combination caused the difference or establish that each medium alone is insufficient.

ViLLA 2.0: Scaling Up

By 2015, ViLLA had grown into a second development phase. At the 2019 presentation we described it as embedded in the University of Cologne’s Zukunftsstrategie Lehrerinnenbildung* (ZuS) project and funded through the BMBF’s Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung. That is a historical project report, not a statement about current funding.

The scale change was significant for us: the 2019 presentation reported 185 videos in the database, across additional subjects, school types, and out-of-school teaching and learning scenarios. That count is project-reported and time-bound. The project site describes both theme-centred and case-based self-learning modules, but does not make an outcome claim for them.

Two types of modules emerged from the practice:

Case-based modules built around a specific filmed sequence, asking the learner to work through what they observe, what decisions the teacher made, and what they would do differently. These are close to case-based reasoning as used in medical education — the video is the case.

Theme-centred modules organised around a pedagogical concept (classroom transitions, group work monitoring, handling disruptions) and drawing on multiple video examples to illustrate the same phenomenon across different contexts. The design goal is pattern recognition beyond one lesson. Whether a schema transfers to a later class in another school requires a transfer measure; the module description alone does not establish it.

The Meta-Portal and What It Means

One development I am particularly interested in from a research infrastructure perspective: ViLLA’s integration into unterrichtsvideos.net, a meta-portal that aggregates classroom video collections from universities across Germany.

The single-portal model has an obvious limitation: your institution’s videos reflect your institution’s context. The schools you filmed, the subject specialists on your team, the pedagogical questions your programme emphasises. The intended benefit of aggregation was cross-collection discovery. Current collections, search fields, entitlements and registration flows must be checked in the live service and are not established by the 2019 presentation.

This can matter for research too. Shared identifiers and sufficiently consistent metadata can support cross-institutional study design, but a portal does not by itself make samples, interventions or outcome measures comparable. I would treat it as research infrastructure, not as a methodology or data-quality guarantee.

What I Think Is Actually Interesting Here

I should be honest about where my personal research interest sits in all of this, because it is not primarily in the technology.

The thing that I find genuinely interesting about the ViLLA project is the implicit theory of professional learning it rests on. We filmed real lessons — not idealised demonstrations, not training videos produced for the purpose, but actual classroom teaching with the roughness and contingency that implies. We then gave those videos to student teachers and asked them to look carefully.

The assumption is that professional perception can be educated. That what distinguishes a competent teacher from a novice is not just accumulated experience but the capacity to read situations quickly and accurately — and that this capacity can be developed through structured encounter with material before you are responsible for it.

This is an empirical claim for specified constructs and interventions, and the cited studies provide bounded evidence rather than a general teaching-effect estimate. It also connects to broader questions about expertise, perception, and what it means to prepare someone for a practice-based profession. Medical education has been working on these questions through simulation and case-based learning for decades. The comparison is suggestive; this post does not measure a sector-wide lag in teacher education.

ViLLA is one attempt to close that gap. Whether it is the right attempt, in its current form, is something I am still working out. But the question it is trying to answer — what do you need to have seen, and thought about, before you can teach well — seems to me like one of the important ones.

Where This Is Going

Two strands that were live at the time of the 2019 presentation and that I will return to in later posts:

The ProvidiS project (Förderung der professionellen Wahrnehmung in digitalen, videobasierten Selbstlernmodulen — Promoting Professional Perception in Digital, Video-Based Self-Learning Modules), a follow-on BMBF project in cooperation with the Universities of Münster and FU Berlin, which moves from infrastructure to targeted intervention design. The question shifts from “does video work?” to “which features of video-based learning design produce which effects on professional perception, for which learners?”

And a methodological strand I have become increasingly interested in: the videography setting itself as a research question. How you film a lesson — camera placement, editing conventions, what gets cut — shapes what the viewer can perceive. The transcript does something similar. These are not neutral mediations. They are constructions, and the choices made in constructing them can affect what evidence is available to viewers. Effects on what student teachers learn to see remain an empirical question. This connects to questions I have been thinking about in qualitative methodology more broadly — which I will probably end up writing about separately.

References

König, J., Blömeke, S., Klein, P., Suhl, U., Busse, A., & Kaiser, G. (2014). Is teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge a premise for noticing and interpreting classroom situations? Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 76–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.11.004

Kramer, C., König, J., Strauß, S., & Kaspar, K. (2020). Classroom videos or transcripts? A quasi-experimental study to assess the effects of media-based learning on pre-service teachers’ situation-specific skills of classroom management. International Journal of Educational Research, 103, 101624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101624

Sherin, M. G. (2007). The development of teachers’ professional vision in video clubs. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron, & S. J. Derry (Eds.), Video Research in the Learning Sciences (pp. 383–395). Lawrence Erlbaum.

van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers' interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–596.

Changelog

  • 2026-07-11: Bounded the 2020 study to its intervention and measures; separated portal capability from transfer, comparability and learning effects; made project access, consent and funding claims time- and deployment-specific.