Critical Moments When Learning to Notice and Enact Responsive Instructional Scaffolding During Fieldwork

• In Event: Instructional Decision Making for Responsive Teaching Across Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
Instructional scaffolding requires attention to students’ immediate needs and decision-making based on those needs (Brownfield & Wilkinson, 2018; Ross & Gibson, 2010). These critical moments for instructional scaffolding (Myhill & Warren, 2005) can challenge teacher candidates, as they have not yet developed the professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) that informs and underpins responsive decision-making (Cowie et al., 2018). This study aims to investigate how Norwegian teacher candidates can progress toward responsive instructional scaffolding in Language Arts when supported by video of their own teaching in mentoring conversations during fieldwork. The research questions are:
RQ1: What critical moments for instructional scaffolding do the teacher candidates and mentors attend to in the candidates’ videos?
RQ2: How do the candidates and mentors reason around these critical moments?

Theoretical Framework
This study is shaped by a sociocultural perspective and builds on studies that have used the theoretical construct of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) to understand how (future) teachers “learn to notice” (van Es & Sherin, 2002, p. 572). As conceptualized in this study, learning to notice involves selective attention to critical moments and reasoning based on professional knowledge and experience (van Es & Sherin, 2002, 2021), as well as predictions of student learning (Seidel & Stürmer, 2014) and weighing of alternative teaching moves and next steps (Santagata & Guarino, 2011).

Methods
This qualitative observation study reports on seven teacher candidates and four school-based mentors who used videos of the candidates’ teaching in mentoring conversations at three different points of time during a 9-week field placement. The data consists of 403 minutes of screen and audio recordings of mentoring conversations, including 32 video clips of the candidates’ teaching. I identified critical moments addressed by candidates and mentors (RQ1) inductively. When analyzing their reasoning (RQ2), I developed an analytical framework by moving between previous research and the empirical data (see Table 1).

Findings
The candidates and mentors attended to 35 critical moments, which fell into four categories; scaffolding (1) text production and (2) text comprehension, (3) sharing observations of student seatwork in whole class, and (4) eliciting and responding to student ideas. While the candidates first attended to more than half of the critical moments, the mentors played a crucial role in pointing to missed opportunities within categories 3 and 4. Moreover, the mentors supported the candidates’ reasoning, for instance, by prompting them to pose hypotheses about the outcome of their initial decision-making and to suggest alternative teaching moves. The mentors also drew the candidates’ attention towards next steps, such as creating responsive classroom interactions to learn more about student needs.

Significance
This study shows that the use of video during fieldwork can serve as a venue for socializing teacher candidates into ways of seeing and questioning critical moments in their teaching. Moreover, several of the critical moments identified in this study align with a larger study of language arts teachers’ missed opportunities in text-based instruction (Tengberg et al., 2022), indicating that some critical moments can be anticipated and targeted in the context of coursework.

Author

• Gøril Brataas, University of Oslo
  Presenting Author