Beginning Teachers Learning to Notice and Respond to Student Thinking

• In Event: Tools and Routines for Preparing STEM Teachers

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore conversations elicited by video clips in a professional development program designed to improve beginning physics teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK; Shulman, 1986) for teaching force and motion concepts.

Theoretical Framework: PCK has been proposed as “the particular form of content knowledge that embodies the aspects of content most germane to its teachability” (Shulman, 1986, p. 9). It includes knowledge of student learning difficulties and instructional representations. As knowledge characteristic of expert teachers, PCK may be particularly important for beginning teachers to develop.
Since the utility of PCK “lies in its value for judgment and action” (Shulman, 1987, p. 14), we turned to van Es and Sherin’s (2002) concept of noticing to articulate what teachers should do with PCK. We expected knowledge of student learning difficulties to be evident in and supported by what teachers notice about student thinking and how they reason about that thinking. We expected knowledge of instructional representations to be evident in and supported by discussions of how to respond to student thinking.

Methods & Data Sources: In 2009-2010, data—including videos of classroom observations and pre/post student interviews—was collected during force & motion units in seven experienced physics teachers’ classrooms. Following Alonzo and Sato (2010), classroom videos were analyzed to identify clips that might elicit conversations about student thinking. Interview videos were coded to identify students’ conceptions about force and motion. Video clips with particularly rich examples of student thinking were compiled into video cases.
A subset of the video clips was used with eight (mostly beginning) physics teachers during a short workshop in Summer 2010. An expanded set of video clips will be used with six beginning teachers during a three-day workshop in Summer 2011. Videos of both workshops serve as data sources for this paper. Two coding schemes have been developed and applied to videos from the first workshop. The first set of codes, derived from Sherin et al. (2009), was used to rate the quality of teachers’ conversations about each video clip. The second set of codes, from Alonzo and Sato (2010), was designed to characterize the components of PCK elicited by each clip.

Results: Analysis of data from the first workshop indicates that teachers’ conversations matched our intentions. Teachers primarily discussed student thinking (the nature of students’ ideas or ways those ideas might be addressed), and the conversations rated highly on Sherin et al.’s criteria. However, researchers and teachers tended to notice different aspects of the video; teachers’ conversations were more specific and contextualized.

Scholarly significance: Prior research has shown that the impact of video on teacher development may depend upon the video clips (van Es & Sherin, 2008). This paper explores the affordances and constraints of a particular method for selecting video clips to support beginning teachers’ PCK. Although PCK is a widely applied theoretical construct, strategies for impacting—particularly beginning—teachers’ PCK are limited. Future work will examine whether these teachers’ discussion of the video clips impacted their classroom practices.

Authors

• Alicia C. Alonzo, Michigan State University

• Jiwon Kim, Michigan State University