Using innovative video technologies to promote pre-service science teachers’ responsiveness
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Background
“After some 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching . . . is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced and frightening activity that our species ever invented” (Shulman, 2004, p. 504).
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The work of teaching “is not natural. To listen to and watch others as closely as is required to probe their ideas carefully and to identify key understandings and misunderstandings, for example, requires closer attention to others than most individuals routinely accord to colleagues, friends, or even family members” (Ball & Forzani, 2009, p. 499).
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“Teaching is full of unexpected events, un-looked for surprises, and unanticipated twists and turns. It is also a highly emotional reality, a marvelously and frustratingly complex mix of moments when our hopes and plans are gloriously realized interspersed with episodes in which we feel lost and flailing” (Brookfield, 2015, pp. x-xi).
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“Teaching is now more widely understood as interactional, improvisational work in which students’ ideas and beliefs are critical resources, the practices that are viewed as important for novices to master include eliciting and interpreting student thinking, leading class discussions, and facilitating small group work, to name some examples” (Forzani, 2014, p. 360).
How can teacher educators better prepare (pre-service) teachers for the complex, improvisational and unnatural work of teaching? This multi-year project aims to make use of innovative video technologies to promote pre-service science teachers’ (PSTs’) capacity to be responsive and to enact responsive teaching. Responsive teaching is a student-centred approach of instruction that caters and adapts to the diverse learning needs of students. In responsive classrooms, teachers foreground attention to the substance of student ideas, recognise disciplinary connections within those ideas and take up students’ ideas (NGSS Lead States, 2013; Robertson et al., 2015).
Responsive teaching is challenging to enact as listening to student ideas is ‘unnatural’ work that does not develop from everyday experience (Ball & Forzani, 2009). More importantly, responsive teaching practices are not simple behavioural teaching procedures. Responsive interactions cannot be scripted in advance but must instead rely on teachers’ abilities to pay close attention to, analyse and react to student thinking as they make in-the-moment teaching decisions during their interactions with students. Although responsive teaching is difficult to enact, it is fundamental to any student-centred and interactive pedagogies that help students learn important content.
This project aims to promote PSTs’ responsiveness by focusing on their abilities to notice student thinking and enact a core practice: eliciting, interpreting and using student thinking (Gotwals & Birmingham, 2016; Kloser, 2014). These abilities are central to teachers’ responsiveness. A teacher’s ability to notice student thinking is a complex set of interrelated skills that comprise three key aspects: (1) attending to students’ thinking, (2) interpreting students’ thinking and (3) deciding how to respond on the basis of students’ thinking (Figure 1). The core practice of eliciting, interpreting and using student thinking entails using strategies or teaching moves to draw out a student’s content-specific thinking, make inferences and respond to it (Figure 2). You can find more information about teacher noticing and core practices here.
Figure 1: The interrelated skills of teacher noticing
Figure 2: Core practice of eliciting, interpreting and using student thinking
This project makes use of innovative video technologies, including wearable first-person point-of-view (POV) cameras and panoramic 360-degree cameras, to capture classroom footage. Video records, including those taken from the back of the classroom (i.e., observer camera in the back (O-CIB)), from teachers’ point-of-view (i.e., T-POV), students’ point-of-view (i.e., S-POV) and panoramic video clips are used as a tool to promote teacher learning. The project is predicated on increasing research evidence showing the unique affordances of video in promoting teacher learning (Blomberg et al. 2013; Gaudin and Chaliès 2015; Marsh and Mitchell 2014). The use of innovative video technologies circumvents some of the limitations inherent in video records. For more information, click here.
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Video clips are used to represent the focal core practice and complex classroom interactions for PSTs’ decomposition. We also utilise a teacher education pedagogy called ‘rehearsals’ (Lampert et al., 2013) for PSTs’ approximations of responsive teaching practices. Click here to know more about rehearsals.
The specific objectives of the project are:
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to build a video archive of exemplary secondary teaching captured using innovative video technologies
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to develop a series of research-informed video workshop materials involving innovative video technologies
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to enhance pre-service science teachers’ abilities to notice classroom interactions and enhance their observation experience of others’ and their own teaching from their teaching practicum.
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to extend existing understanding in the field of education of how to make use of classroom videos to enhance teachers’ abilities to notice classroom interactions
The project had three phases:
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Collecting video footage from highly accomplished secondary teachers
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Using rehearsals to promote pre-service science teachers’ enactment of responsive teaching
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Using video footage to develop pre-service teachers’ responsiveness