Building Video Infrastructure to Support Teacher Development of Responsive Instructional Practice (Poster 6)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Purpose
Responsive instruction requires teachers to make in-the-moment interpretations accounting for multiple, competing goals. When students offer ideas that teachers don’t anticipate, do they work to uncover the perceived connection? Or do they check-in after class? How does decision-making change for, say, a student’s first public contribution? Such judgments happen quickly, embedded in situational particulars, and they are at the heart of responsive teaching.

Traditional professional development (PD) is limited in helping teachers learn to make in-the-moment decisions. Typically, PD andragogy entails one-shot workshops that “deliver” new methods. Yet these approaches don’t support teachers’ sensemaking about contextual particulars, a critical component of responsive instruction. In fact, responsive teachers show a different kind of teacher knowledge: they tend to think ecologically about lessons, playing out the ways that changes ripple across the classroom system; they tend to consider instructional issues at different time scales; and they often consider students’ experiences of teaching (Horn & Kane, 2015). However, teachers often lack representational infrastructure to develop these ways of thinking (Hall & Horn, 2012).

Method
We designed a video formative feedback (VFF) process to facilitate co-inquiry into instruction. Briefly, VFFs unfold in six steps: (a) a teacher identifies a question of interest (e.g., how well do my questions surface student thinking?); (b) during the lesson, they identify three focal student groups to record; (c) the research team documents a lesson with the question in mind, using a whole-class tablet camera mounted on a tripod, recordings of the student groups, and a point-of-view camera on the teacher; (d) the team reviews the recordings, with the teacher’s question in mind, identifying moments that support inquiry; (e) the teacher, their colleagues, and members of the research team meet to review clips in light of the teacher’s question.

We found that the VFF process supported teachers’ development of situative reasoning (Authors, 2022), but we wanted to refine this infrastructure further to account for (a) lesson time and (b) classroom space. We thus augmented the original process to include transcriptions and visualizations of video data over space and time using an approach called interaction geography (Shapiro et al., 2017; Shapiro et al., under review). This allowed us to transcribe teachers’ movement in detail and dynamically visualize their movement over space and time, alongside conversation and multi-perspective video (see Figure 1).

Findings
Using these tools, teachers can study classroom videos in new ways that foreground the role of their use of space during classroom lessons, as well as contextualize interactions in videos to different points of the lesson. These aggregated and dynamic video-based representations further the VFFs’ original goals and provided new kinds of reflective experiences for teachers by deepening their understanding of the situativity of their practice.

Significance
The VFF infrastructure centers teachers’ situative sensemaking as a core form of knowledge, pushing back on “best practices” discourses that dominate PD. By re-infrastructuring professional learning in this way, our research team documents the crucial nature of this knowledge for meaningful change that better attends to students’ learning needs.

Authors

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University

• Brette Garner, University of Denver

• Ben Rydal Shapiro, Georgia State University