Seeing the Classroom Differently: The Influence of Experience on Teachers’ Visual Perception of Problematic Classroom Management

Author(s):

Charlotte E. Wolff(presenting / submitting)Halszka Jarodzka Henny P.A. Boshuizen

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 04 D, Learning to Teach: Classrooms and Differentiation

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

09:00-10:30

Room:

B228 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Peter Gray

Contribution

The teaching profession demands highly developed cognitive processing. It takes years of professional practice in the classroom to cultivate the knowledge and expertise leading to substantial student learning gains (Berliner, 2001). How teachers perceive and interpret the complexity of classroom events, especially student interactions, is an important component of this cognition. It is practical knowledge specific to the profession.

Teachers’ practical knowledge draws on the knowledge, conceptions, beliefs, and values teachers have about their own teaching practice. Its development can be seen as an integrated process that relies on practical experience gained in the classroom (van Driel, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2001). Explicating the relationship between teachers knowledge and the actual practice of teaching, including essential components of effective classroom management, is still a work in progress (van Tartwijk, den Brok, Veldman, & Wubbels, 2009). Research on teacher cognition remains incomplete, particularly with regard to how teachers perceive and represent educational events, and how these differ between beginner and experienced teachers (Hogan et al., 2003). Such is the case in European classrooms and elsewhere.

Existing theories about teachers’ cognition needadditionalsupport because systematic inquiry into the specific contexts of teachers practical knowledge has not been fullyrealized(Bromme, 2001).Classroom perception is a critical skill for effective teaching: one which depends on a combination of practical knowledge and keen visual perception. The ‘professional vision’ of teachers – their ability to search for, observe, and make sense of classroom information – develops over time as they gain experience in the practices of their profession (Goodwin, 1994).

Visual expertise has been extensively investigated in numerous professions, yet research on teachers’ professional vision is scarce (Reingold & Sheridan, 2011). While we know that experienced teachers have valuable classroom knowledge about students and events allowing them to effectively discern and manage classroom complexity, we know little about how teachers perceive and make use of their classroom perceptions (Carter, Cushing, Sabers, Stein, & Berliner, 1988). Understanding of developmental differences in teachers recognition of perceptual cues remains limited (van den Bogert, van Bruggen, Kostons, & Jochems, 2014).

Our study investigated how differences in teaching experience affects the way teachers view and process the different classroom management events taking place within the classroom. We combined eye tracking measurements and verbalizations to form a coherent picture of teachers’ perceptual processing. Eye tracking allows for the measurement and analysis of eye activity, providing an objective measure of visual cognitive processing and was used to establish expertise differences in perceiving the classroom. Eye movements are measured and analysed in relation to the environment in which they occur, making it possible to interpret where a person’s gaze and attention is directed, the gaze duration (fixations), and the order in which gazes and attention are allocated. Verbalizations supplemented eye tracking data, specifying the classroom events that teachers considered relevant to classroom management. Eye movements conveyed the primary perceptual details and the verbalizations conveyed the teachers’ interpretations of what they perceived.

The motivation driving our exploratory analysis was to understand the extent to classroom expertise influences teachers’ visual perception and viewing strategies. The main research question we investigated was: How do experts and novice teachers differ in the visual perception of the classroom?

This broad question was tackled by specifically considering the following research questions:

Do expert and novice teachers focus their attention differently across the classroom?
Which areas of the classroom do experts and novices fixate on the longest in the classroom?
Where do experts and novices look most frequently when viewing classroom events?
Which areas do expert and novice teachers overlook as they perceive the classroom?

Method

Our study investigated teachers’ professional vision, concentrating on teachers’ visual processing of problematic classroom management videos. Sixty-seven teachers (M=35.5, SD=16.3; 26 females and 41 males) from diverse subject domains (Language, History, Geography, Math, Biology, Economy, and Information Technology) volunteered for the study: 37 experienced Dutch secondary school teachers comprised the experts (M=49.2, SD=10.3) and 35 teachers-in-training from a Dutch teacher education program comprised the novices (M=20.6, SD=2.3). Experts had 10-35 years of teaching experience, were recognized by colleagues as above –average classroom managers, and were recommended by their school directors as experts in the classroom. Novices were classified simply on the basis of their inexperience as teachers, were in their first or second year of teacher training, and had completed between 10- 40 hours of classroom teaching in the context of their training program. Videos of authentic classroom lessons were used to investigate how teachers with different expertise levels noticed and attended to relevant information (Seidel, Stürmer, Blomberg, Kobarg, & Schwindt, 2011). Two types of videos were shown. Four short video fragments showed either (1) disengaged, off-task student behavior, or (2) conspicuous student disruptions affecting many students in the class. To capture and compare expertise effects on the perceptual and interpretive processing between the two groups, eye tracking measurements and think-aloud verbalizations were recorded simultaneously as teachers viewed the classroom videos (Van Gog, Paas, & Van Merrienboer, 2005). Participants were asked to imagine themselves as teachers in these lessons and to think aloud about any issues in the classroom that they found relevant to classroom management. To replicate the time constraints of real-world classroom monitoring, the videos were played at normal speed and participants were not allowed to stop or manipulate the video stimuli during the experiment, but were free to continue talking even after the video fragment had ended.

Expected Outcomes

Mixed-design ANOVA analyses of eye movements showed significant expertise differences for fixation dispersion averages, F (1, 66) = 7.03, p = .01, η²= .10, indicating that experts and novices do focus their attention differently. Novices’ viewing strategies were more dispersed, whereas experts’ were more focused. Irrespective of video type, experienced teachers concentrated on relevant perceptual information, while inexperienced teachers’ attention was scattered irregularly across the classroom. Calculations of confidence intervals with a 99% degree of probability were used to compare fixation lengths, repeat fixations, and overlooked areas. Here, too, classroom expertise influenced viewing, particularly where teachers looked longest, how frequently they looked there, and which areas they overlooked. Experts looked longer at more areas across the classroom and typically overlooked areas where no student activity was occurring, whereas novices spent less time viewing high-activity areas and overlooked areas repeatedly viewed by experts. Experts perceived classroom cues by looking at students’ posture, hands, and legs, and at between-student interactions. Novices mainly perceived students’ faces and concentrated on students construed as the source of management problems, rarely attending to the effects of classroom disturbances. These insights into teachers’ professional vision suggest that teachers at different stages of development perceive students differently. They provide practical cues for interpreting classroom interactions and guidelines for training and improving teachers’ visual expertise and classroom management. Teachers’ abilities are inseparably linked to the quality of student learning achieved in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, Linda, 2006; Hattie, 2009; Stigler & Hiebert, 2009), meaning that not only teachers, but also students, stand to gain from enhanced visual perception in the classroom. The better able teacher training programs are at explicating the practical knowledge and cognition of teaching, the more likely the skills, knowledge, and impact of expert teaching can be passed on rather than reinvented in beginner and developing teachers.

References

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Author Information

Charlotte E. Wolff (presenting / submitting)

Open University of the Netherlands

Teaching and Teacher Development

Heerlen

Halszka Jarodzka

Open University of the Netherlands, Netherlands, The

Henny P.A. Boshuizen