Quantifying Large Class Pedagogy through Video Recordings

• In Event: How Do We Handle All the Children? Understanding Pedagogies for Overcrowded Classrooms in Malawi

Proposal

Documenting the pedagogies that teachers use in large classrooms requires more than just asking them what they do. After gathering transcript data from focus group discussions, a natural progression of the scientific approach led us to observing and analyzing the teacher and learner behavior patterns found within the classroom. In order to deeply understand the complex nature of these interactions, our research team video recorded 27 lessons across 9 primary schools located throughout all four regions of the country. We targeted the largest standard (grade) 2 and 4 classrooms at each school, with most of these classrooms holding over 100 learners. Using the Observer XT software by Noldus, we embarked on behavioral coding for the teacher and students (as a whole). This process began by creating an a priori code book based on strategies identified throughout a scoping review and during analysis of the audio file transcripts. Several videos were screened with the initial coding scheme, and the codebook underwent multiple iterations of refinement until we believed the most meaningful aspects of instruction (as identified by the literature and the participants) were captured. We focused the codes on teacher instructional behaviors, classroom management techniques, assessment practices, patterns of discourse, lesson content, and students’ behavior patterns (as possible) in these videos. The coding team was engaged in training, discussion, and inter-rater reliability checks to ensure that all team members understood the codes in the same way before being assigned videos for coding. The team regularly completed reliability checks to ensure the team remained above 90% reliability throughout the process.

From the video data, we were able to identify specific challenges of teaching a large classroom while also spotlighting some promising practices. These data allowed our team to comprehensively analyze the ecosystem of an over-crowded, low-resourced classroom while watching teachers in action as they work to meet the diverse needs of so many learners. This lesson dissection, in conjunction with participant’s stories of their daily realities, sheds light on teacher’s perceptions of best practice and their greatest areas of need, providing a platform on which to build more effective and efficient pedagogies. Preliminary results of this exploratory research show noteworthy findings on teacher/learner interactions, assessment practices, feedback procedures, and durations of content instruction. In this final presentation of the panel, we will highlight the project’s most important findings (with a focus on the video data), discuss pedagogical implications of these findings, share potential policy implications, and wrap up the session with a set of discussion questions for participants to ponder.

Authors

• Jennie Robinette, Florida State University, Learning Systems Institute

• Brenda Aromu Wawire, Florida State University, Learning Systems Institute

• JAI BUM KOO, Florida State University

• Amogh Basavaraj, Florida State University

• Adrienne Barnes-Story, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University