ClassInSight: Supporting Teacher Noticing and Reflection on Classroom Discourse

• In Event: Methodological Innovations for the Automated Analysis of Classroom Discourse

Abstract

Purpose
A critical component of teacher learning is receiving formative feedback on one’s performance, which enables reflection and noticing of key features of problems of practice. There has been rising interest in technologies that can assist teachers in noticing core features of instruction as a means to drive teacher learning and instructional change (e.g., Chen, Clarke & Resnick, 2015). ClassInSight is one such system. It is a personal informatics (PI) system for teaching which visualizes classroom discourse for teachers to reflect and notice aspects of talk-mediated instruction. We report on the first phase of a design-based research project with ClassInSight, targeted towards designing a personal informatics system for teachers to reflect on their practice using analytics of their class discussions.

Theoretical Framework
There has been rising interest in technologies that assist teachers in noticing core features of teaching practice for professional development (e.g., videos or dashboards) (e.g., Sherin & van Es 2005; Martinez et al, 2012). Developments in automated analysis of classroom dialogue provide new frontiers for design and inquiry on teacher professional learning (Kelly et al, 2017). They afford new and rapid means of annotating classroom practice in ways that can focus teachers’ attention on meaningful features of practice (e.g., pressing for student explanation and transactive reasoning), which can generate data-informed self-reflection and data-driven decision making. Until now, receiving this kind of data on a routine basis has been difficult, as quantified representations of classroom activity are difficult to capture without technology and/take time to process. Thus, these developments provide a means to investigating how representations create space for perturbation on what happens classroom dialogue and teacher’s pedagogical reasoning that arises from reflection on practice (Dewey 1910; Schon, 1984; Clarke et al, 2016).

Methods/Data Sources
Using design-based research methods, we report on the design and development of ClassInSight, working with a cohort of 12 middle and high school science teachers. We report on Year 1 of this project, which employs in-depth qualitative data of teacher class discussions, followed by cycles of design and deployment of ClassInSight to study how to use argumentation and reflect on practice with analytics.

ClassInSight is designed to support micro-level processing (fast, implicit processes) to anchor and situate macro-level processing (slow, deliberative, planful). Classroom sensors record speech and gesture (which are used at proxies for class discussion) and transform these features into analytics for teacher reflection on their practice. Sensors record and digitize gestures and speech, and automatically transform algorithmically into analytics about classroom discussion. Teachers view analytics the ClassInSight app any time immediately after recording of a target lesson.
Results/Significance
In our first design-based research cycle, we have found that use of such a system over a semester can lead to changes in teaching behaviors and beliefs about what constitutes good teaching practice. In this paper, we share insights on how teachers interact with their own data and how such regular feedback can open new opportunities teacher learning and for design for teacher learning.

Authors

• Sherice Clarke, University of California - San Diego

• Amy Elizabeth Ogan, Carnegie Mellon University