Editorials

Mathematics Education

Novice Teachers’ Use of Student Thinking and Learning as Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness: A Longitudinal Study of Video-Enhanced Teacher Preparation

by Rossella Santagata & Karen Taylor
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This study examines whether preservice teachers’ experiences with video analyses during teacher preparation have long-lasting effects on their practices once they enter the profession. Specifically, the authors examined whether teachers who had opportunities to analyze student thinking and learning during teacher preparation continued to do so when they reflected on their teaching effectiveness as full-time teachers.  A group of elementary school teachers who attended a video-enhanced mathematics methods course were compared to a control group at the end of their first year of full-time teaching. Teachers were asked to assess two lessons they had just taught by describing lesson learning goals and providing a rating of lesson effectiveness and a rationale for their evaluation. Teachers who attended the video-enhanced course during teacher preparation outperformed their counterparts in both the quality of evidence they drew upon and their attention to individual or subgroups of learners. Study limitations and future directions are discussed.

Video in the Middle: Purposeful Design of Video-Based Mathematics Professional Development

by Nanette Seago, Karen Koellner & Jennifer Jacobs
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In this article the authors described their exploration of a particular design element they labeled “video in the middle.” As part of the video in the middle design, the viewing of carefully selected video clips from teachers’ classrooms is sandwiched between pre- and postviewing activities that are expected to support teachers’ engagement in and learning from the video. These three elements (prevideo, video, and postvideo), taken together, comprise a videocase. Videocases can then be further sequenced to create a specified professional development (PD) curriculum. Purposeful selection of each video clip allows for coherence between the prevideo, video viewing, and postvideo activities, which in turn, supports the link between a given videocase and identified teacher learning goals. Incorporating a video in the middle design within a video-based mathematics PD environment can promote a detailed and focused examination of complex mathematical content, the relationship between pedagogical decisions and practices, and an unpacking of students’ mathematical thinking.  It is essential to underscore the major role that facilitators play in video-based PD, and that the effective application of the video in the middle design is, in large part, dependent on skillful facilitation. The video in the middle design can be useful across different content areas and teacher education settings.

Science Education

Leveraging Analysis of Students’ Disciplinary Thinking in a Video Club to Promote Student-Centered Science Instruction

by Tara Barnhart & Elizabeth van Es
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Recent policy reports and standards documents advocate for science teachers to adopt more student-centered instructional practices. Four secondary science teachers from one school district participated in a semester-long video club focused on honing attention to students’ evidence-based reasoning and creating opportunities to make students’ reasoning visible in practice. Although all participants expressed value in attending to students’ ideas and shifting autonomy to students in the classroom, they experienced varying levels and types of integration in their practice. Analysis revealed that teachers’ goals and commitments influenced the incremental ways in which participants integrated learning from the video club. Sustained and substantial changes to practice likely require support through multiple cycles of shifting visions of what is possible, coupled with collaborative attempts to work through challenges of implementation.

Examining the Quality of Preservice Science Teachers’ Written Reflections When Using Video Recordings, Audio Recordings, and Memories of a Teaching Event

by Brendan Calandra, Laurie Brantley-Dias, Johnathan Yerby & Kadir Demir
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A group of preservice science teachers edited video footage of their practice teaching to identify and isolate critical incidents. They then wrote guided reflection papers on those critical incidents using different forms of media prompts while they wrote. The authors used a counterbalanced research design to compare the quality of writing that participants produced when they had access to either their edited video clip of the incident, audio from the clip only, or their memory of the incident alone while writing. All reflection papers were evaluated using a rubric developed by Ward and McCotter (2004). An analysis of variance among paper scores showed that participants wrote significantly higher quality papers on several indicators when prompted by video than when prompted by audio. There was also a difference in means between their reflections when prompted by video and when they worked from memory alone.

Video-Enhanced Training to Support Professional Development in Elementary Science Teaching: A Beginning Teacher’s Experience

by Christine Hamel, Anabelle Viau-Guay, Luc Ria & Justine Dion-Routhier
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Elementary teachers are expected to teach complex and authentic lessons and integrating multiple disciplines. In so doing, they must take many elements into account, such as disciplinary content, learning standards, and pedagogical knowledge, in an ever more complex environment, including pupils’ increasingly heterogeneous characteristics. Our study aims to understand a beginning teacher’s classroom activity in the context of a research-training program involving the use of video. The teacher involved was observed giving a science lesson (on buoyancy in a fourth-grade classroom) and then took part in two interviews involving self-confrontation with researchers at 1-week intervals, returning to the classroom between these interviews. Specifically, this article presents a program aimed at training and mentoring a beginning elementary school teacher using video recordings of her classroom activities in Quebec, Canada. The analysis describes the teacher’s experience during this training process. In particular, the results indicate that the teacher’s participation in this training program changed her concerns related to science education at the elementary level. Her focus shifted from classroom management (e.g., managing hands-on activities in science education and pupils’ interactions) to supporting an approach favoring scientific inquiry that truly engages pupils and is anchored in sociotechnical controversies.

 

General

Analysis of Video-Based Training Approaches and Professional Development

by Serge Leblanc
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The use of videos to analyze teaching practices or initial teacher training is aimed at helping build professional skills by establishing more explicit links between university education and internships and practical work in the schools. The purpose of this article is to familiarize the English-speaking community with French research via a study of the use of videos in preservice teacher education. The scientific research trend called “course of action” is presented, along with a brief summary of several studies conducted in the context of initial teacher education in France, which point out the respective contributions of four distinct video-based approaches to professional development for educating new teachers. Last, the authors’ conceptual contribution is presented based on a few scientific studies conducted between 1965 and 2017 that exemplify the different approaches to the use of video-based training for new and experienced teachers. This conceptualization is designed to help the field rethink the various ways of conceiving of video resources in education, of providing guidance during video viewing, and of organizing the various goals of video viewing and the different objects of analysis into a step-by-step teacher-training program.

Referentiality in Secondary Teachers’ Video Observation of Others’ Teaching

by Valérie Lussi Borer, Simon Flandin & Alain Muller
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This article presents a study of individual video-based educational sessions with secondary trainee teachers (N = 30) observing others’ teaching. Within a Peircian semiotic framework, the study was designed to deepen the researchers’ understanding of video-enhanced experience in educational settings beyond the usual research areas of noticing, interpreting and reflecting. Facilitated think-aloud protocols were used, the trainees’ verbalizations were transcribed and the data were coded using semiotic schemes. The analysis revealed eight referentiality items jointly underlying the teachers’ activities of description, interpretation, and evaluation while video observing. The results suggest the need to acknowledge the dimension of referentiality in video observation as a legitimate object of research, instructional design, and facilitation in the field of teacher video-enhanced education, especially during the induction period.

Current Practice

The Impact of Preservice Teachers’ Experiences in a Video-Enhanced Training Program on Their Teaching: A Case Study in Physical Education

by Cyrille Gaudin, Sébastien Chaliès & Jérôme Amathieu
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This case study documents the influence of preservice teachers’ experiences in a Video-Enhanced Training Program (VETP) on their teaching. The conceptual framework of this VETP comes from a research program in cultural anthropology based on Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy. Influence was identified during self-confrontation interviews with preservice teachers (n = 8) in physical education with a video of their teaching. The findings indicated that this VETP program improved their ability to conduct a lesson. More precisely, these results showed the kinds of experiences PTs mobilized from the VETP (and others) when teaching, their number (n = 6), and the ways in which they drew on a variety of experiences. Two main avenues for modifying VETPs are then proposed: First, teaching should be viewed as both an object and a training situation, and second, VETPs should be integrated into a broad teacher-training path, which should be understood as a pool of experiences from which each teachers forge their own initial teaching practice.