Professional Vision and Preservice Teachers: Learning to "Notice" Through Creating Multimedia Artifacts

• In Event: Cyber-Enabled Research That Repurposes a Major Video Collection on Students' Mathematical Reasoning

Abstract

Effective teachers need to look at their classroom and make judgments about students’ learning and reasoning. Practicing teachers are frequently called upon to observe their colleagues’ teaching to offer constructive feedback. As a result, many accreditation approaches such as the edTPA have begun to explicitly ask pre-service teachers to observe, describe, and evaluate teaching, including their own (Kunzman, 2014; About edTPA). Our project explores the relationship between pre-service teachers’ ability to observe learning theories in action, and new digital tools designed to support them in documenting these observations.

This exploratory study focuses on pre-service teacher’s articulation of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994; Sherin & van Es, 2001). Professional vision refers to using a theoretical lens to support noticing key features in a learning environment, interpreting them, and responding. The development of professional vision involves honing the practice of teaching through attention to noticing (Borko, 2004). For pre-service teachers, video can be used as a tool for developing skills in noticing. As teachers develop expertise in the skill of interpreting classroom situations, they use evidence to support what they notice on video. This suggests that professional development including video may afford greater learning for teachers (Sherin & van Es, 2005).

Our analysis examines the development of professional vision in one pre-service teaching course at a large Midwestern University as students created VMCAnalytics to explore connections of theory to practice. This task was developed to prepare education students for future work on teaching portfolios, as well as for the complexity of classroom practice. We examined how students displayed professional vision in VMCAnalytics, and how this vision was influenced by collaboration.

The participants in this study were 27 pre-service teachers enrolled in “Educational Psychology for Elementary Teachers.” Participants were asked to tie concepts learned in class to the action of authentic classroom video by selecting and annotating three “events” from short assigned video clips. After creating a first draft, students discussed their VMCAnalytic with peers, and had opportunities for revision. To explore the progression of professional vision, we developed a coding scheme with four levels of codes at two time points (before and after peer collaboration). This scheme defined noticing as “making connections between specific events and broader principles of teaching and learning” (Sherin & van Es, 2001, p. 574). Our coding scheme, which built upon Sherin & Van Es (2001; 2009), analyzed pre-service teachers’ video clips and annotation within their VMCAnalytics.

Our analysis detected a high-level pattern. First, many students provided little explicit evidence for the connection of the video clip to theory in early versions of VMCAnalytic events. In the revision process, explanations for theoretical and conceptual connections emerged, and the theories referenced included further explicit support from video and more nuanced descriptions of theory. Most VMCAnalytics showed improvement between pre and post-collaboration versions. These results show that constructing a VMCAnalytic provides occasions for pre-service teachers to see how theory can be part of their professional vision, but that they may also need collaboration to make the most out of these opportunities.

Authors

• Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, Indiana University

• Andrea Sarah Gomoll, Indiana University - Bloomington