Session Information
Contribution
One of the relevant skills of teachers' professional development is the competence for observing and analysing lessons. In our recent study we learned which perceptual and thinking capabilities student teachers are typically missing in comparison with expert teachers when observing lessons, and which theoretical generalisations they would need in order to focus their attention on relevant issues and for analysing what they are perceiving. We asked groups of novice and expert teachers to comment on the instructional events and phenomena of a tape-recorded classical lesson (see Krull, et al., in press). The analysis of teachers' comments revealed that that student teachers perceive less in and reflect less on the classroom events and features related to presenting new material, providing learning guidance to pupils, enhancing the retention and transfer of what has been learned, and for creating a positive classroom atmosphere than expert teachers. These findings point to the likelihood that novice teachers inadequately perceive many relevant instructional events and, consequently, give faulty interpretations to them. The aim of this study is to test the effectiveness of an experimental methodology, elaborated on the basis of our research, for promoting student teachers' lesson analysis skills during their ten-week pedagogical school practicum in the secondary schools of Tartu, Estonia. The designed intervention procedure aims at achieving a twofold objective - developing student teachers' perceptual capabilities of relevant lesson events, on the one hand, and providing them with a theoretical framework or conceptual basis for lesson analysis, on the other hand. The actual training sessions consist of a guided analysis of observed video-recorded and live lessons taught by expert and student teachers. The teacher educators' or supervisors' main task is in drawing student teachers' attention to relevant and critical lesson events and to the way the model teacher implements these events, and in providing student teachers with an holistic lesson analysis scheme. This scheme, or rather a general framework, for lesson analysis is created in student teachers by introducing them to lesson models and asking them to analyze the observed lessons in the light of specific questions.A training session of lesson analysis skills starts with a group observation and analysis of video-recorded lessons in seminars and ends with out-of-class work for completing individual written analyses by using study aids, including the recordings of the observed lessons and their transcripts available on a website.To the end of identifying the impact of experimental training on the student teachers, their lesson analysis skills were tested twice - at the beginning and at the end of a pedagogical practicum. A control group of students having conventional supervised school practice was also tested using the same procedure, which consisted of writing analyses of a recorded lesson not used for training purposes.The conclusions on the progress of student teachers' lesson analysis skills during the school practicum are based on qualitative content analysis of submitted lesson analysis reports and on the comparison of average progress made by students belonging to the experimental and control groups. The comparison of lesson analysis reports is carried out in terms of the total number of analytic idea units produced, the variety of these units, simultaneous commenting on teaching and learning activities, the general relevance of comments to critical lesson events, and the explicit or implicit references to theoretical ideas involved.The experimental study is currently under way (the student teachers' school practicums start in November and end in January 2007) and its preliminary findings will be reported at the conference.Krull, E., Oras, K., & Sisask, S. (In Press). Differences in teachers' comments on classroom events as indicators of their professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education.
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