Filming, Leadership, and Education: A Job Shadowing Experience

My interest in leadership started many years ago. I have been fortunate to learn form a wide-variety of individuals, mostly by watching them lead.

This works well for me as I tend to learn best by seeing how others do something versus reading it in a book or listening to a lecture. The books or the lectures setup the foundation of what we need to learn, but learning tends to happen from actually participating in the scenario at hand.

Through the Penn State Emerging Leaders (PSEL) program I was fortunate enough to participate on two job-shadowing experiences. The first was to assist videographer Dan Wagner with the filming of a job training seminar with the Healthy Bodies Project. The purpose of this project was to film program staff training teachers from Pennsylvania schools on how to access information from the program website and use this information to work with their elementary school students and parents.

I have filmed interviews, lectures, and events prior to this experience, but I am not a classical trained videographer. All of what I know comes from experimentation, observing others, and lynda.com videos. So, I followed Dan’s lead to see what technique’s I could add to my toolbox.

The first thing that we did was scout the location — something I’ve done before, but this experience was unique in that with two of us there was a dialogue, sort of a brainstorming session. This session helped me see the room through the eyes of someone else, which gave me some things to consider next time I’m out scouting a location on my own. For example, we discussed worst-case scenarios for things that might change during the presentation. A speaker could decide to stand in front of windows, which would make it difficult to capture them without proper lighting. Working through these scenarios made the actual filming with two people on opposite sides of the room much easier.

During the actual video shoot, everything went well. We knew what the other was thinking and how to maneuver our cameras to help the other person out, i.e, if the speaker stood out of one cameras frame, the other was there to pick up.

So, how does this all fit into leadership and learning, design, and technology? Filming is central to any great online course. Care must be taken to ensure that the audience stays engaged with the video and has something to take away. Many teachers underestimate video quality and the planning to produce a great video. There are quite a few applications on the market that help produce video, but, many of them are trendy and should not be a substitute for a high quality video. Secondly, the video must be built into short segments. The purpose for the filming of the Health Bodies Project was to edit a 45 minute to 1 hour training video. From my work in learning design so far and my experience in the communications and marketing world, video needs to be short. One major take away from this filming experience is that when a project or course is in the planning phase, great care must be taken to ensure that the videos are in short snippets to augment the course, not solely teach the course. Engaging with online learners who are in their homes, offices or coffee shops is difficult as there are many distractions compared to a classroom. The video must keep the attention of the learner and hep them avoid these distraction.

In terms of leadership, this experience shows that communication and planning is key to a successful event. A leader must anticipate what’s coming, communicate with the team, the audience, and the client, and stay calm if that worst-case scenario takes place.