"What Did Students Actually Say and Do?" Cultivating Responsiveness to Multilingual Students Through Video Analysis

• In Event: Video Analysis for Pedagogical Sense-Making Among Teacher Learners Across Disciplines

Abstract

Using methods of self study and action research, I examine how in-service elementary teachers earning their endorsement for teaching English language learners (ELLs) benefited from a video analysis assignment and how I cultivated this learning opportunity through my in-class and written discourse. The video analysis assignment was designed to help teachers critically examine ELLs’ moment-to-moment interactions in classrooms, which is central to theories of second language learning (Pica, 1994; Swain, 1985; Vygotsky, 1978) and increasingly important for ELLs to achieve the Common Core Standards of collaboratively reasoning and justifying their solutions to problems (Hakuta, Santos, & Fang, 2013). Findings from the study show that due to my facilitation of the video analyses, teachers successfully investigated videotaped lessons at the macro-level but infrequently showed depth in their microanalysis of classroom interactions.

Data collection included videotaped class meetings among the teacher educator and 17 in-service elementary teachers, 17 teachers’ written analyses of their videotaped lessons, and my written feedback to teachers. To conduct a self-study focused on my own facilitation of the videotapes, I used van Es et al.’s (2014) framework for teacher educators’ facilitation of videos, which includes codes such as lifting up teachers’ interpretations and pressing for more reasoning from teachers. For the action research portion in which I investigated how teachers reflected upon their videos, I used Barnhart and van Es’s (2015) framework for teachers’ sophistication of noticing, analyzing, and responding to student contributions.

Findings reveal that teachers recognized, reflected on, and subsequently improved the opportunities for their students to contribute in their lessons, but fewer teachers analyzed students’ actual contributions in the videos. A major theme of teacher learning was that teachers noticed how little students were able to contribute or interact during their lessons, which led teachers to make instructional changes. One teacher, for instance, wrote, “I had no clue that I wasn’t allowing this interaction to take place throughout the day until after actually watching my teaching.”

While these analyses led to shifts in teachers’ instruction, few teachers showed high sophistication in highlighting and responding to students’ comments. Discourse analysis of our course meetings, though, shows that I prompted teachers to examine teacher actions instead of attending and responding to students’ contributions. My prompts, for instance, were, “How did the math teacher make the standard or objective relevant to students? How did he ensure the ELLs could join the conversation and activities?” Problematizing my “self” (Feldman, 2002) leads to implications for future iterations.

Significant implications of helping all teachers to attend and respond to growing numbers of ELLs in their classrooms can cultivate teacher learners’ abilities to enact culturally responsive pedagogies. Practically, teacher educators attempting to build upon teacher learners’ nascent abilities to respond to student thinking (Levin et al., 2009) must make conscious efforts to improve facilitation of video analyses along this aim, through critical friends and research designs that merge self-study and action research. Prioritizing student thinking above curriculum, materials, and teaching strategies is central to educating diverse democracies.

Author

• Shannon Mary Daniel, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College