Teachers beliefs and actions: Using video analysis to see the difference
Posted by Art Recesso on Fri, Apr 08, 2011 @ 12:08 PM
An activity for helping novice instructors see the similarities and discrepancies between beliefs and action:
Before the field experiences began, prospective teachers wrote a narrative that focused on their vision of teaching science and on their beliefs about science teaching and learning. They described how they saw themselves as teachers and their beliefs about: (a) how students learn (b) the role of the teacher in the classroom, and (c) the role of students in the classroom. The vision and beliefs statements were used in conjunction with video evidence of practices that the student teachers recorded.
Over the next four weeks each prospective teacher progressed through multiple stages of reflection, two of which (evidence collection and analysis) were instantiated in the VAT tool (see Figures 1-4). Each prospective teacher used VAT to analyze their practices, generate reflections about issues of teaching and learning, and open opportunities to discuss these issues with peers and teacher educators. In general, analysis involved the user employing a combination of web-based functions (e.g., video playback), time coding video into segments, and associating the segments with a lens. Because the task of analyzing their practice as well as VAT itself was new to the students, we predetermined a lens for analysis.
Framing issues of practice. Prospective teachers often have a very broad conceptual understanding of practices and student learning, but little experience from which to examine or understand their meaning. To address another common barrier to using video analysis (inability to identify and frame issues in teaching and learning), we assisted students in identifying issues of practice to frame by providing the prospective teachers with questions purposefully designed to use as a lens for analysis, to encourage a comparison of beliefs and practice, and more specifically to identify consistencies and discrepancies between beliefs and actions: (1) From evidence in your teaching practices, find instances/examples that you think resonate with or illustrate your current beliefs about science teaching and learning. Explain why you think these episodes resonate with or illustrate your current beliefs; and (2) From evidence in your teaching practices, find instances of your teaching that you think contradict your current beliefs about science teaching and student learning. Explain why you think these episodes contradict your current beliefs.
