Designing for Framing: Supporting Teachers' Attending to Student Thinking in Online Video Discussions of Engineering

• In Event: Innovations in Video-Intensive STEM Professional Development in Online and Blended Environments

Abstract

Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015). Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in—how teachers frame (Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1993) what they are doing. Learning to attend to student thinking is, at least in part, a matter of learning to frame video discussions and classroom activities as opportunities to make sense of what students are saying and doing, rather than, say, evaluating students or focusing on pedagogical moves. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. In this study, we examine in-service teachers’ framing in online video discussions of classroom engineering during an asynchronous online graduate certificate course that used design conjectures on supporting teacher framing. Our goals in this study were to examine (1) how teachers frame the video discussions in this online course and (2) what are shifts in their framing from the start to end of the course.

In two courses with 47 total educators, we archived digital written comments on two Early Videos and on two Later Videos, selecting matched Early and Late Video pairs that addressed similar aspects of engineering design. For each comment, we coded for teachers’ framing, drawing on prior coding schemes on teacher noticing (Luna & Sherin, 2017) as well as markers for teachers’ expectations and framing (Tannen, 1993). Two researchers independently coded 1972 comments, with an interrater reliability of 89%. Chi-square tests were used to compare the distributions of teachers’ comments in Early and Later Videos.

We first examined what teachers attended to in the videos: student thinking, student engagement, pedagogy, or other topics. The majority of teachers’ comments focused on student thinking (71% Early; 86% Later, p<0.0001). We then looked at how teachers framed their comments centered on student thinking: evaluating, making sense of, or comparing students’ ideas/approaches. In Early Videos, 45% of the all comments were framed as making sense, while in Later Videos 72.5% of comments indicated this framing. We also observed a corresponding decrease in the proportion of evaluating comments, from 22% to 13% (p<0.0001). Teachers not only frequently attended to student thinking throughout the course, but they developed stability in how they framed the discussions, overwhelmingly framing them as opportunities to make sense of student thinking in Later Videos.

This study addresses calls for online teacher education to advance theory building on the relationships between web-based technologies, facilitator and participant interactions, and teachers’ learning (Dede et al., 2009; Moon et al., 2013). We drew on the construct of framing to conceptualize these relationships, designing a course to negotiate how teachers frame their interactions in online video discussions. By showing that it is possible for teachers to frame these discussions as opportunities to make sense of student thinking in an online forum, this study opens up possibilities for considering how online teacher education can support teachers’ reasoning and practice.

Authors

• Jessica Watkins, Vanderbilt University

• Merredith Desiree Portsmore, Tufts University