What Happens When Teachers Discuss Video Online?

• In Event: 63.085 - MTCC Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 63.085-1 - Investigating Opportunities for Teacher Learning in Online Video-Based Labs

Abstract

The usefulness of video for teacher professional development (PD) is widely recognized. For example, studies of video clubs, in which teachers watch and discuss video from each others’ classrooms have shown that, over time, the ability of teachers to analyze classroom videos improves (Sherin & Han, 2004). More strikingly, experiences in video clubs have been shown to positively impact participants’ classroom instruction (Sherin & van Es, 2009). Video is employed for research as a means of studying the knowledge of teachers, for instance, as a way to investigate the nature of teacher attention (Ainley & Luntley, 2007) or to measure teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (Kersting, 2008).

Strengths and Limitations of Video
Online video-based courses provide new possibilities, both for PD and for research on teacher cognition. Such courses have the potential to make video-basd PD widely available, and to greatly scale up research on teacher learning that makes use of video. However, it is far from obvious that online discussions of video will have the same affordances as in-person discussions that have dominated research to date. While in both settings teachers watch and comment on videos, in online settings, teachers comment in writing rather than verbally, and discussion is asynchronous so that successive comments in a discussion can be separated by hours, days, or even weeks.

Goals and Analyses
To examine this issue, this paper characterizes the nature of teachers’ digital comments on video in the context of our project’s courses. Given that online courses of this sort are relatively new, we believe it is important to answer even very basic questions. With that in mind, we analyzed the frequency and length of individual teacher comments. We also describe the structure of discussions — to what extent and in what ways are comments by a teacher related to preceding comments by other participants, and to what extent do participants take on different roles (van Es, 2009) in the online space. Finally, we present our analyses concerning the substance of teacher utterances, and the ways in which teachers’ online comments are similar to or different from those made during in-person discussion of videos. We also discuss how the differences we describe are traceable to particular affordances and constraints of our online context.

Data and Analysis
Data for this study include the written comments of 40 elementary teachers who participated in one of several online courses on modeling in either science or mathematics. Across the 10-12 weeks of the courses, teachers made over 1800 written entries, averaging about 100 words each and posted almost 250 video excerpts. Analysis of the data draws on qualitative methods (Strauss & Corbin, 1988) as well as on the techniques of educational data mining (Baker and Yacef, 2009) and learning analytics (Martin & Sherin, 2013). Following prior research, we code the substance of teachers’ comments using the dimensions of topic, actor, and stance (Authors, 2009a), and peer responses by examining the extent to which teachers participate in joint-sense making and focus on substantive, rather than superficial, aspects of the videos (Authors 2009b).

Authors

• Tracy Dobie, University of Utah

• Christopher Leatherwood, Northwestern University

• Miriam G. Sherin, Northwestern University

• Bruce Sherin, Northwestern University