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Article Excerpt
Over the past decade, dozens of video-based programs for teachers have been created, and more are currently in development. Although a range of design principles guide these varied programs, one key assumption is shared. Watching and reflecting on video is thought to be a valuable activity for teachers, one that has the potential to foster teacher learning.
This focus on video as a tool for teacher learning has prompted a number of recent studies on what and how teachers learn as they interact with video in professional development (e.g., Goldsmith & Seago, 2008; Nemirovsky & Galvis, 2004). Yet few studies examine the effects of viewing video on teachers' practices outside of the professional development environment. Although important exceptions do exist (e.g., Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008; Cohen, 2004), we believe that far too little is known about how video supports teacher learning, particularly given its extensive use in teacher education and professional development. The goal of this article is to make progress on this issue by studying mathematics teacher learning in a particular video-based professional development environment that we call video clubs. Furthermore, we bring a specific lens to our study of teacher learning in this context. We examine how teachers develop professional vision, the ability to notice and interpret significant features of classroom interactions, as they participate in a video club.
In brief, we found that participating in a year-long video club influenced the teachers' professional vision as it was exhibited in the video club meetings, in interviews outside of the video club meetings, and in the teachers' instructional practices. These results suggest that professional vision is a productive lens for investigating teacher learning via video. In addition, this work illustrates that video clubs have the potential to support teacher learning in ways that extend beyond the boundaries of the video club meetings themselves.
Video-Based Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers
Although video-based materials for teachers have been created in a number of subject areas, mathematics education in particular has witnessed a wealth of development in this area. Mathematics teachers today can choose from a variety of video cases and multimedia tools as contexts for examining teaching and learning (e.g., Beardsley, Cogan-Drew, & Olivero, 2007; Boaler & Humphries, 2005; Seago, Mumme, & Branca, 2004). The continued popularity of video reflects, in part, the recent emphasis on practice-based professional development for mathematics teachers (Ball & Cohen, 1999). The claim is that teachers benefit from opportunities to reflect on teaching with authentic representations of practice. Video seems to offer precisely this, a window into the classroom that conveys "the complexity and subtlety of classroom teaching as it occurs in real time" (Brophy, 2004, p. 287).
In our work, we examine the potential of video to support teacher learning in the context of video clubs. In a video club, a group of teachers meets to watch and discuss excerpts of videos from each other's classrooms. Two key issues concerning teacher learning in this setting are the focus of the current study. First, we consider what teacher learning is exhibited in the video club meeting themselves. Specifically, we explore how the conversations that occur change over time. Second, we examine the influence of the video club experience on teachers' thinking outside of the video club. Thus, although teachers may exhibit certain changes in the video club context as they interact with peers, we also want to investigate whether similar changes are demonstrated in other contexts. To do so, we examine teachers' comments in interviews before and after the series of video club meetings. In addition, we investigate how teachers' experiences in the video club influence their subsequent teaching practices.
Using Video to Support Teacher Learning
A critical question for those who study the role of video in mathematics teacher learning concerns what it is that teachers are expected to learn from such interactions. In fact, reviews of video-based programs for mathematics teachers reveal that programs have been developed with a number of different learning goals in mind (Santagata, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2005; Sherin, 2004). For instance, some programs have as their purpose to help teachers learn new pedagogical techniques such as the use of manipulatives or problem-solving activities (Bitter & Hatfield, 1994). Along the same lines, Oonk, Goffree, and Verloop (2004) describe the development of the Multimedia Interactive Learning Environment as a way to illustrate national standards in mathematics instruction. The goal in doing so is to help teachers increase their repertoire of pedagogical strategies. Programs such as these generally use video to model exemplary practices that the viewer will subsequently emulate. Thus, the learning consists of being able to reproduce a specific set of practices in one's own classroom.
Other programs have been designed with the goal of developing teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching (Ball & Bass, 2003), an understanding of mathematics that is "useful for, and usable in, the work that teachers do as they teach mathematics to their students" (Stylianides & Ball, 2008, p. 308). Such knowledge involves an in-depth understanding of mathematics on the part of the teacher, as well as knowledge of how students learn mathematics and how to select tasks, representations, and explanations to use in class (Ball, Thames, Phelps, & Hill, 2005). Programs that share this learning goal include Videocases for Mathematics Professional Development (Seago, 2004) and the Problem Solving Cycle (Koellner et al., 2007). In these cases, video serves to bring teachers into the "actual practice of teaching" in which they engage in "interpreting the mathematical logic of student thinking, analyzing the mathematical territory of a problem ... [and] designing probes to elicit student mathematical understandings" (Seago, 2004, p. 276).
More recently, some video-based programs have undertaken the task to help teachers learn to notice important features of classroom interactions (e.g., Santagata, Zannoni, & Stigler, 2007; Star & Strickland, 2007; van Es & Sherin, 2008). These efforts are motivated in part by research that demonstrates that novice teachers tend to pay attention to surface-level features of classroom interactions while more expert teachers are able to discern interactions that are considered substantive (Berliner, 1994). The ability to attend to instruction in a discriminating manner is particularly important in the context of current U.S. mathematics education reform. Specifically, reform calls for teachers to pay close attention to a lesson as it unfolds. Moreover, there is a sense that mathematics instruction in the United States takes place to some degree in the moment as teachers recognize the direction that a lesson is moving (Smith, 1996). In light of such reforms, even veteran teachers may need to learn to notice new kinds of events in the classroom. Using video to help teachers learn to notice generally involves introducing teachers to specific frameworks for attending to instruction or directing teachers' attention to particular features of classroom interactions.
To be clear, an individual video-based program for teachers may not lie squarely in only one of the three paradigms presented. For example, although the Problem-Solving-Cycle has as a central goal to improve one's knowledge for teaching mathematics, helping teachers attend to noteworthy features of instruction is also a focus of the program's efforts (Borko et al., 2008).
The Development of Teachers' Professional Vision
Our own approach to using video with teachers focuses primarily on the third learning goal described above--using video to support learning to notice. Furthermore, we characterize the ability to notice in a particular way, in terms of what we call "teachers' professional vision" (Sherin, 2001, 2007). Thus, our goal is to examine how video clubs support the development of teachers' professional vision. Goodwin (1994) introduced the term professional vision as a way to describe the ability that members of a professional group share for interpreting phenomena central to their work. In Goodwin's words, professional vision involves "ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group" (p. 606). For teachers, the phenomena of interest are classrooms. Thus, teachers' professional vision involves the ability to notice and interpret significant features of classroom interactions.
In previous work, Sherin (2007) describes professional vision as consisting of two main subprocesses: (a) selective attention and (b) knowledge-based reasoning. Selective attention concerns how the teacher decides where to pay attention at a given moment. Classrooms are complex environments, with many things happening at once. The teacher must choose from among this complexity where to focus his or her attention. Prior research discusses similar notions. For example, Bell and Cowie (2001) introduce the notion of "interactive formative assessment" (p. 541) in which teachers recognize learning and nonlearning on the part of students during instruction. In other work, Fraivillig, Murphy, and Fuson (1999) emphasize the importance of teachers' ability to "wait for and listen to" (p. 155) student ideas. Their point is that by carefully listening to the range of ideas that students offer, the teacher will recognize those that are particularly important, given the goals of the day's lesson.
The second process, knowledge-based reasoning, refers to the ways in which a teacher reasons about what is noticed based on his or her knowledge and understanding. For example, a teacher might reason about a particular event based on his or her knowledge of the subject matter, knowledge of the curriculum, or knowledge of students' prior comments. This process is similar to what Lampert (1985) reports as she considers key factors related to dilemmas she encounters during instruction. Likewise, Hammer (1997) provides an account of his own reasoning process, as he makes sense of unexpected situations with which he is faced while teaching.
Selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning interact in a dynamic manner. That is, the kinds of interactions that a teacher notices will likely influence how the teacher reasons about those events. In addition, a teacher's knowledge and expectations can be expected to drive what stands out to the teacher in any given situation.
Research Design
The data presented in this article come from two yearlong video clubs facilitated by the researchers. The first author was the primary facilitator for the Nile Video Club, and the second author was the primary facilitator for the Mapleton Video Club. Both video clubs were designed with the goal of supporting the development of teachers' professional vision in a particular area. Specifically, the video clubs shared a common goal of helping teachers learn to identify and interpret the ideas students raise about mathematics. This focus reflects recent research in mathematics education that emphasizes the need for teachers to be able to look closely at student mathematical thinking (Ball, Lubienski, & Mewborn, 2001). Such research suggests that when teachers pay close attention to students' ideas, the opportunities for student learning increase (Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001). Yet making sense of student thinking on the fly has been show to be quite challenging for teachers (e.g., Heaton, 2000). Thus, this seemed to be a valuable focus for our professional development efforts.
Video Club Designs
Four middle school mathematics teachers participated in the Nile Video Club, which met monthly across one school year for a total of seven meetings. On average, the meetings lasted 40 minutes. The teachers had a range of years of teaching experience, from 1 to 28 years. They volunteered to participate and were paid a nominal stipend at the end of the year. Nile Middle School is located in an affluent suburb of a major U.S. city on the West Coast, with over 70% of the student population reporting as Caucasian....
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