The noticing of physical education teachers: a comparison of groups with different expertise

ABSTRACT

Background: Teachers’ important diagnostic abilities include noticing and interpreting students’ behaviors and learning processes. By focusing on noticing, I refer to the theoretical framework of professional vision. Professional vision includes the ability to notice what is occurring in complex classroom situations (selective attention) and the ability to give these events meaningful importance (knowledge-based reasoning).

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate the noticing differences of groups with different expertise while they observe students’ activities in gym class.

Participants and setting: Sixty participants with different sport-specific and pedagogical expertise were asked to describe and interpret videotaped teaching sequences. Observational data were obtained from physical education classes. The focus was on motoric and social learning processes.

Research design: The groups were compared in a four-field design according to their observations and interpretations of students’ activities in gym class.

Data collection: The teaching sequences function as stimuli to activate selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning. The participants were questioned in guided interviews.

Data analysis: The participants’ comments were recorded, transcribed and analyzed based on qualitative content analysis. The analysis was performed with the software program MaxQDA. The comments were subsequently exported to the software program SPSS 20 for further analysis.

Results: By comparing groups with different sport-specific and pedagogical expertise, this study reveals new observation foci when people exclusively monitor students’ behaviors, not teachers’ behaviors, in authentic teaching situation along with different observation foci based on expertise.

Conclusions: The findings indicate that noticing is a characteristic of professionalization that should be given greater consideration in physical education teacher education (PETE) programs. Special observations tasks (e.g. focusing on social processes) and supplemental theoretical materials for specific issues in PETE programs that use video recordings could help improve learning to notice.

KEYWORDS:

• Diagnostic competence
• professional vision
• physical education teacher education
• video analysis
• teacher professionalization

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Silja Flach for her assistance in data collection and analysis. I am grateful to all of the participants in the study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [RE 3197/1-1].