Video and Practice-Based Teacher Preparation: Effects on Teaching and Self-Reflection Abilities

• In Event: Translating Thought Into Action: How Digital Video Use Benefits Teachers

Abstract

In the last decade, the teacher education research community has argued for teacher preparation programs to help pre-service teachers “become serious learners in and around their practice” by making learning in the context of teaching a critical component of teacher preparation (Ball & Cohen, 1999). Many teacher preparation programs have begun to use a practice-based and analysis-focused curriculum to optimize learning and to assist in strengthening the connection between university courses and classroom practice (Mason, 2002; Hiebert, et al., 2007; Jacobs, et al., 2007; van Es & Sherin, 2008; Star & Strickland, 2008). However, most existing work on practice-based and analysis-focused teacher preparation has concentrated on developing conceptual frameworks; less is known about what pre-service teachers learn from these experiences (Ball & Cohen, 1999, Ball, Sleep, Boerst, & Bass, 2009, Feiman-Nemser, 2001: Grossman, et al, 2009; Hiebert, et al., 2007; Lambert & Ghousseini, 2007. Lampert, 2010).

This paper investigates the use of video as a tool for connecting the knowledge and practice of teaching in mathematics teacher preparation. Under study is an intervention aimed at preparing future elementary school teachers to build on student thinking while teaching and to reflect on the effectiveness of instructional strategies by drawing on evidence of student learning. Video recordings of practice are used to decompose complex teaching. Participants learn to unpack practices and to highlight components that relate to student thinking, mathematical ideas, and the interrelation between teachers’ decisions and student learning.

The paper reports on findings of a quasi-experimental study in which two groups of 12 pre-service teachers each are compared. The treatment group participated in a 10-week video-based intervention, while the control group did not. Two learning outcomes were considered: (1) pre-service teachers’ classroom practices as captured by video, and (2) their abilities to reflect on their own practices, recorded in written commentaries. Results reveal that pre-service teachers who participated in the intervention were able to implement instructional practices more attentive to student thinking and learning. Specifically, these pre-service teachers were observed to probe more deeply into student thinking by asking questions after an initial response that focused on students’ conceptual understanding. Intervention participants also built instructional decisions on student input by encouraging student-to-student talk and using student comments and solutions to guide classroom discourse. In addition, analysis of the written commentaries showed that treatment-group participants reasoned about the effectiveness of their teaching by focusing on student thinking and learning while control-group participants limited their attention to themselves. Furthermore, treatment participants were able to draw on more specific evidence of student thinking to assess the effectiveness of their teaching and designed successive lessons based on their hypothesized impact on student learning.

These findings will be discussed in light of the kinds of video used in the intervention and the guidance provided to the viewers. In addition, implications for future implementation of the intervention will be presented.

Authors

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine

• Cathery Yeh, University of California - Irvine