Video Analysis and Professional Noticing in the Wild of Real Science Teacher Education Classes

ABSTRACT

Video analysis of teaching episodes is a widely-used approach in science teacher education. While numerous scholarly articles have been written on the topic, there are still many unanswered questions about the most effective strategies for integrating this approach into science teacher education. The current article adds to this area of inquiry by detailing the use of video analysis and reflection across a three-course sequence in an MAT program in secondary STEM education. The same instructor taught all three courses, and this instructor presents the affordances and constraints of the use of video analysis integrated with the professional noticing framework. A pair of researchers who collected data during the year-long implementation of this integrated approach share the outcomes from their perspective. Using ideas associated with distributed cognition from Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild, the instructor and researchers show that most of the shortcomings with this integrated approach were a result of not effectively distributing knowledge across the different components of this system—including both humans and instruments. The authors specify how those shortcomings could be addressed by others seeking to replicate aspects of this integrated approach. They also show that, despite the missteps in helping the MAT candidates learn how to use video and the professional noticing framework to improve their pedagogy, the candidates did show evidence of achieving the ultimate goal of this effort: knowing how to analyze and articulate their own and others’ teaching practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Science teacher preparation
• video analysis
• professional noticing
• reflective practitioner
• distributed cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ McDonald (2016) has argued that one of the differences between novice and expert teachers is the ability of the latter to focus on larger grain sizes when analyzing [inquiry] teaching practice. Limiting the grain size of a critical incident to even the level of an interaction between teacher and students (or between students) ignores the fact that several events, occurring over longer spans of class time, may all be responsible for how a critical incident unfolds. However, when working with teacher candidates, it seems that emphasizing smaller grain sizes may be an appropriate initial approach.