SCIENCE TEACHERS' LEARNING TO NOTICE FROM VIDEO CASES OF THE ENACTMENT OF COGNITIVELY DEMANDING INSTRUCTIONAL TASKS

Members of a profession develop a professional vision that enables them to see and understand complex situations in particular ways. This study focuses on developing science teachers’ professional vision by supporting their learning to attend to particular classroom interactions and make sense of them in particular ways. Specifically, this study investigated high-school biology teachers’ learning to notice in a professional development (PD) setting from video cases that depict classroom interactions during the enactment of high-level, cognitively demanding science tasks. A seven-session, video-based PD intervention in which teachers analyzed short video clips that illustrated students’ engagement with cognitively demanding tasks was designed and implemented. The findings focused on changes in teacher noticing from pre- to post-PD as revealed through the analysis of two sets of baseline and exit interviews with each individual teacher as well as the analysis of particular PD sessions. According to the findings, there were mostly significant changes in what teachers attended to in the video cases and how they made sense of what they saw. In addition, there was a shift towards connecting the specifics of what they noticed in the video cases to the level or kind of student thinking as outlined in the Task Analysis Guide in Science framework. The findings are promising in terms of developing science teachers’ professional vision of classroom interactions during the enactment of cognitively demanding tasks. The study findings provide implications for designing effective PD programs to support teachers’ professional vision

Pre-Service Teachers Notice Student Thinking: Then What?

Research has demonstrated that pre-service teachers (PSTs) can learn to notice students’ thinking in sophisticated ways by analyzing videos of classroom interactions. What is less clear is how PSTs use what they notice about student thinking to inform how they respond. Secondary math and science PSTs from three teacher preparation programs were invited to analyze a video clip identifying noteworthy moments of student thinking and describing an instructional move they might make and why. A qualitative analysis of their responses indicates that the PSTs overwhelmingly noticed both the substance and the source of students’ ideas. However, the patterns in their responses to these moments varied. These findings suggest that PSTs would benefit from spending more time unpacking what it means to respond to students’ thinking. The study provides implications for teacher education with respect to the careful selection of classroom clips and tools to support novice teachers developing responsive teaching practices

A framework for planning and facilitating video-based professional development

Abstract Background Recent transformative changes in science education require new learning opportunities for teachers—opportunities that include rich images of classroom enactment of the reform vision. One fruitful way for doing that is to use video clips of instruction. Teachers do not, however, learn how to improve their instructional practice from simply watching and reflecting on classroom videos. The videos need to be carefully selected and embedded in professional development in ways that—through facilitator-led, participant-centered discussion—can help teachers to notice and reason about important aspects of instruction and learning that occur in the video. Consistent with the recent efforts to identify planning and facilitation approaches that guide effective professional development (PD) programs, in this paper, we adapted the Five Practices Framework for orchestrating productive classroom discussions to describe how PD facilitators plan for and enact professional learning tasks to help science teachers learn within a video-based PD program. These practices include anticipating, sequencing, monitoring, selecting, connecting and two additional practices that set the stage for the five practices (i.e., setting goals and selecting tasks). Results Our analyses of the video-based discussions in the PD provide insights into how the facilitators engaged teachers in video-based conversations by using the practices of monitoring, selecting, and connecting. The monitoring moves, such as clarifying, countering, and redirecting, were used by the facilitator in nearly all the PD sessions. Similarly, selecting moves were used and were consistent with the goals of the PD. Finally, analysis of facilitators’ and participants’ connecting comments indicated their increased capacity to make connections to the bigger ideas of teaching science by maintaining the cognitive demand on students’ thinking. Conclusions This paper provides elaborated descriptions of the five practices for planning and facilitating video-based PD and the ways in which they were enacted in a video-based PD program in science. In so doing, it proposes five practices as a guiding framework to support teachers’ learning from videos. Overall, the study’s results endorse the promise of a goal-driven, theory-informed design that foregrounds careful attention to teachers’ thinking in ways that support their understanding of complex classroom interactions