Video and Visualization in Teacher Professional Development: Effects of Teacher Learning on Productive Classroom Talk

• In Event: Technology-Enhanced Dialogic Instruction

Abstract

Objectives and Framework

Teachers’ use of productive classroom talk has been shown to be beneficial for student learning, by which teachers guide students to articulate their own thinking, listen to each other, and think with others in the classroom (Mercer et al., 2019; Resnick et al., 2015). However, teachers often find it difficult to engage students in productive classroom talk that involves deep reasoning, so the dominant form of classroom discourse in practice is still recitation (Resnick et al., 2018). To address this problem, this study aims to design a teacher professional development (PD) program to help in-service mathematics teachers learn and improve productive classroom talk.

Recently, PD paradigms are shifting from being institution-based, knowledge- and theory-oriented to being more school-based and practice-intertwined (Korthagen, 2017). Video technologies are used in PD practice to support teacher learning and reflection (Borko et al., 2014; Groschner et al., 2018). For example, Hennessy et al. (2018) developed a PD program featuring video-stimulated discussions of practices, led by a teacher “ambassador” and co-developed by the participating teachers. They found that the research-informed and school-based activities helped the teachers deepen their understandings of classroom dialogue and devise approaches to better use the interactive whiteboard for supporting dialogic teaching. This school-based and practice-intertwined PD approach inspires researchers to explore technologies for supporting teacher learning on productive classroom talk.

Methods and Data

In this presentation, we introduce a PD program that leverages video and visualizations for facilitating teacher reflection on their classroom talk. In the program, we incorporate the Classroom Discourse Analyzer (CDA), a tool for visualizing classroom discourse (Authors, 2020). Using the CDA, teachers can view classroom video, transcripts, and the visualizations of academically productive talk moves (APT; Michaels et al., 2008; Resnick et al., 2010) in a synchronous manner. The CDA also visualizes other properties of classroom discourse, such as the words, turns, and turn-taking patterns by the teacher and students. Teachers can click on the visualizations in the corresponding video or transcripts for data-supported reflection and discussion.

Findings and Significance

In a year-long PD intervention, a group of secondary mathematics teachers (n = 24) had five hands-on PD workshops (each lasting about two hours, once every 1-2 months) using the CDA to reflect and discuss their use of APT in the classroom. After the intervention, the participating teachers, relative to the comparison teachers who only received knowledge-based PD workshops, significantly increased their use of APT moves for guiding students’ elaboration, reasoning, and thinking with others in the classroom. The participating teachers reduced the total words they spoke per lesson and their students increased their words per turn in the classroom, relative to the comparison teachers and their students. We discuss the findings regarding two elements that were likely to make the technology-support PD program successful. First, the video and visualization technologies could facilitate teacher learning and reflection through data-based evidence. Second, teacher collaboration in a group of three or four during the PD workshops could facilitate their learning from one another’s ideas and skills.

Author

• Gaowei Chen, University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author