Teachers supporting students during open classes have become one of the key issues of educational practice – in the VET-classroom, and beyond. Giving adequate support of students is considered pedagogically relevant both in the context of individualized student-centred learning (e.g. Weimer, 2002) and with respect to implementation of competence-oriented teaching methods (Bruijn & Leeman, 2011). In German VET, this has been formalised in the concept “Handlungsorientierung” (e.g. Gudjons, 2001;  engl: activity-oriented teaching).

Despite the importance that educational theorists put into individualized teacher support, the body of empirical evidence about which behaviour on the teacher’s side might be actually adequate, effective and thus supportive is scarce. This is especially the case for research in naturalistic classroom settings, i.e. without experimental or quasi-experimental interventions. Because only scarce evidence exists with respect to those questions, and none of this evidence was addressed to the specifics of VET-education, the present study follows a descriptive-explorative approach, aiming to give a clearer picture of teacher supportive behaviours in the naturalistic VET-classroom.

The lack of evidence for teacher supportive behaviour in naturalistic classroom situations might be at least partly due to specific methodological challenges. To validly and reliably asses naturalistic educational situations they need to be researched via behaviour observation methods, which are difficult to realize, time consuming and difficult to operationalize (e.g. Pellegrini, 2004). Multi-modal video-and audio-analysis here provides a couple of advantages, amongst others it provides insights on more than one perspective and allows for repeated analysis of a recorded situation under more than one perspective (Siemon, Boom, & Scholkmann, 2015).

Theoretically, research around the construct ‘scaffolding’ provides a sound framework to analyse teacher supportive behaviour, and thus was used as a baseline and starting point for the present study, Scaffolding has been originally described as verbal interventions that facilitate students’ cognitive learning processes by giving hints and prompts that help the student to reach his/her zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1976; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Subsequently, scaffolding has been further distinguished into different means that can be applied (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; van de Pol, Volman, & Beishuizen, 2010), and further defined by the attributes of ‘contingency‘, ‘fading‘ und ‘transfer of responsibility‘ (van de Pol et al., 2010: 275). However, studies in which scaffolding has been reconstructed empirically (e.g. Belland, Glasewsik, & Richardson, 2008; Hong, Wei, Guanghua, & Wanxia, 2011; van de Pol & Elbers, 2013; van de Pol, Volman, & Beishuizen, 2012) normally lack the perspective on the larger context of all interactions, thus indicating that ‘scaffolding’ in  total might be too narrow a concept to describe the wealth of teacher supportive behaviours in the naturalistic classroom.

At this point the present study sets on by asking the question:

• Which types of supportive behaviours can be inferred from observation of teacher-student interactions in the naturalistic VET-classroom?

Additionally, we were interested in complementing aspects of the support process described in previous literature, namely:

• Who initiated the supportive behaviour sequence  - teacher or student?
• How did the teacher make use of diagnostic strategies to assess the student’s need for support and direction?
• Who profited from the teacher support - a single student, a group of students or a whole class?

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