International Portal of Teacher Education

Source: Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 18(1), 11-28. (2018)
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

In this study, the authors examined whether preservice teachers’ experiences with video analyses during teacher preparation had long-lasting effects on their reflective practices once they entered the profession. Specifically, they 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.

Methods
The participants were 24 elementary-school teachers (21 females and 3 males).
All participants attended the same teacher preparation program at a public university in the United States.
Eleven participants attended a video-enhanced methods course, and 13 participants were in the control group.The participants 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.

Findings
The authors found that 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.

The results highlight that different teachers thought differently about their lessons when asked whether they were effective.
The authors found that some participants relied mainly on instructional strategies they used and on general impressions about students’ overall engagement or ability to perform tasks correctly, whereas others attended to the details of their students’ thinking and difficulties and mapped those onto expected learning trajectories.

The authors argue that these differences are striking in that participants were all first-year teachers and one can imagine quite different paths in their future development.
The authors also found that overall, as a group, teachers received lower scores on the Attention to Individual or Subgroups of Learners rubric than on the Focus and Quality of Evidence rubric, possibly indicating that attending to individual students’ thinking and understanding is a skill that needs time to develop and is not prevalent in novice teachers.