Classroom Videos as a Tool for Reflection and Professional Development in History Education

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

Abstract

Theoretical background
Video has become increasingly popular in professional development programs as a means for capturing the everyday experiences of teachers and students. As Sherin (2004) points out, video provides the chance to enter the world of the classroom "without having to be in the position of teaching in-the-moment" (p. 13). Therefore, it can be used to analyze classroom situations from a distance, highlighting aspects of classroom life that a teacher might not notice while carrying out a lesson. The findings of various studies suggest that video-based reflection does provide an opportunity for teachers to enlarge their knowledge and to question their own belief systems about instructional practice so that the nature of teachers' reflections can change over time (e.g. Borko et al., 2010; Sherin & Han, 2004). However, a yet unanswered question is if teachers' analytic skills to reflect and analyze lessons would apply during instruction. Sherin and van Es (2009) presented some analyses suggesting that teachers' professional vision developed in the classroom quite similar to the developments identified in videoclub meetings. Encouraged by these results we conducted a case analysis of eight history teachers who participated in a video-based in-service teachers’ training course from the perspective whether teachers would apply a theoretical framework of students' historical reasoning skills (vanBoxtel & vanDrie, 2008) in their lesson preparation and if so, whether the theory-driven decisions would end up in visible changes of teaching practice.

Video-based intervention and research methods
The time frame provided for the in-service teachers’ training course contained seven half-day meetings within six months. Before and after the intervention, a history lesson taught by the teachers within their own classes was videotaped. Additionally, a semi-structured teacher interview was conducted to catch teachers’ planning decisions and their use of the theoretical framework. Analyses of the videotaped lessons contained high-inference ratings of several aspects of instructional quality and in-depth analyses of the quality of the proposed learning tasks.

Results
Interview analyses revealed that teachers' understanding of the introduced framework varied a lot; sometimes neglecting its theoretical roots. Considering theory, teachers started to depict blind spots in their teaching, e.g. absence of historical text sources, lack of opportunities to come up with one’s own historical questions or judgements. As a consequence, they started to experiment with new learning tasks. In some cases, teachers tried to expand their repertoire of instructional methods. However, changes in teachers’ self-reports were not mirrored in the videotaped lessons. High-inference ratings of lesson quality do not support the notion of change from pre- to post-test video. Furthermore, learning tasks aimed at fostering students’ reasoning skills showed a closer spectrum in the post-test rather than in the pre-test lessons. The findings point at the challenges of video-based reflection and the introduction of a new instructional approach in Secondary I history classrooms.

Authors

• Monika Waldis, University of Zuerich

• Corinne Wyss, University of Teacher Education