Designing and Studying Video-Based Professional Development Within a Teacher Learning Progression Framework

• In Event: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Effective Video-Based Professional Development

Abstract

The goal of our video-based professional development (Teaching Science with Cognitive Demand! (TSCD) is to increase science teachers’ capacity to select and successfully enact cognitively demanding instructional tasks. In science, such tasks often require deep student thinking while engaging in scientific practices (NRC, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013). Prior research revealed challenges of implementing cognitively complex tasks (e.g., Author, 1997; Jones & Eick, 2007; Schneider et al., 2005). Once teachers observe that students are struggling with high-demand tasks, they often lower the task demands by changing its requirements or by taking over and “doing the thinking” for the students (Author, 1996). TSCD was designed to address this problem of practice. In this paper, our goal is to uncover how TSCD sessions were designed and orchestrated by the facilitator through the use of video representations of teaching to guide teachers’ inquiries into teaching science with high cognitive demand.
TSCD consisted of two parts: 1) analyzing science tasks, and 2) analyzing video case(s) of classroom enactments of high-level tasks. The Task Analysis Guide in Science (TAGS) (Author, 2015a) was used to help teachers to classify instructional tasks at varying levels of cognitive demand. The PD designers’ and facilitator’s thinking as they planned and orchestrated video-based PD sessions was based on the belief that teachers should derive, through video analysis, the instructional practices necessary for maintaining high cognitive demand for student thinking. By carefully selecting the video clips and designing PD-tasks around the analysis of those clips, the intention was for teachers to construct their own understandings of teaching science by maintaining high demands for student thinking by not only attending to and interpreting student thinking but also by identifying how teacher moves impacted students’ opportunities to think and engage in science.
Analyses of transcripts of PD sessions with a focus on participants’ contributions and facilitator moves revealed that participant learning across the PD sessions followed a pathway that passes through three phases. First (the Sensing Phase), participants began to notice important classroom interactions during the enactment of a high-demand task through analysis and discussion of carefully selected video clips. Second (the Surfacing Phase), participants began to identify (and bring to the surface) teacher moves that accompany the maintenance vs. the decline of cognitive demand by viewing and talking about two purposefully selected contrasting video clips (Author, 2014a). Finally (the Labeling Phase), participants assigned “names” to the instructional practices associated with high and low-levels of student thinking, and identified those practices in their own teaching. The paper includes results of this analysis with key examples of the video-based PD-tasks and facilitator moves.
We argue that these phases constitute one potential framework for designing video-based PD. These findings also extend the current knowledge base on the practices of video-based PD leaders and designers (e.g., Borko et al., 2014; van Es et al., 2014) by proposing a framework to focus on a connected arc of sessions that teachers progress through as they learn the practices needed for ambitious teaching.

Authors

• Miray Tekkumru-Kisa, Florida State University

• Mary Kay Stein, University of Pittsburgh