Session Information
10 ONLINE 39 B, Mentoring, Reasoning & Feedback
Paper Session
MeetingID: 879 2887 5155 Code: n1V7dd
Contribution
Feedback can critically influence student learning if provided in certain ways and under certain conditions (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Wisniewski et al., 2020; Shute, 2008), and preparing teacher candidates to provide high-quality feedback is thus an important target for teacher education. A substantive body of research has demonstrated that high-quality feedback focuses on the process, the task, and student self-regulation rather than the self-levels (Hattie & Timperley, 2017) and addresses specific qualities of student work, substantive elements of the subject matter, and what students can do to improve (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Furthermore, feedback is subject-dependent, individual-dependent, and context-dependent (van der Kleij & Adie, 2020), implying that teachers need deep knowledge about the subject matter and their students, together with high proficiency in terms of developing a classroom climate and dealing with complexities while teaching (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Researchers thus argue that feedback is aided when teachers automate many other tasks in the classroom (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Against this backdrop, feedback stands out as a complex and differentiated construct (Wisniewski et al., 2020) that may be difficult for teacher candidates to approach due to their limited classroom experience (Kartchava et al., 2020; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019). This is particularly the case for oral feedback – a prominent feature of classroom talk (RuizPrimo & Furtak, 2006), as it is often provided spontaneously. However, our knowledge about how teacher candidates develop the skills needed to provide oral feedback to students is scarce, and research investigating the implementation of feedback as a formative assessment practice is called for (Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019; Gao et al., 2019). In that vein, researchers have highlighted the importance of hands-on learning (Kartchava et al., 2020; Ropohl & Rönnebeck, 2019) and the potential of video recordings during fieldwork to allow candidates to see themselves grow and get more experience giving feedback (Prilop et al., 2020).
The present study builds on and contributes to the growing body of research on video as a pedagogical tool in teacher education and professional development (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015) by exploring how video can be used to spur generative discussions about oral feedback practice during fieldwork. The study is informed by previous research which has demonstrated that video can support teachers and teacher candidates in identifying, examining, and reasoning about significant classroom situations with attention to both teacher enactment and student learning, as a basis for making instructional decisions in the future (e.g., Walsh et al., 2020: van Es & Sherin, 2002; Sun & van Es, 2015). A central concept in the present study is the notion of critical moments, which we define as moments in the candidates’ feedback practice videos which are “significant either in supporting the development of a child’s understanding or in hindering it, or where an opportunity to build on a child’s response was missed” (Myhill & Warren, 2005, p. 59). The following research questions guide this study:
RQ1: Which critical moments do the candidates and their mentors address when discussing the candidates’ feedback practice videos?
RQ2: What kinds of talk related to critical moments generated new insights about oral feedback practice?
Method
This paper reports on two pairs of teacher candidates and two mentors within the context of the candidates’ fieldwork in Language Arts in an upper secondary school. Prior to the fieldwork, the candidates had worked with videos of experienced teachers’ instructional scaffolding, including oral feedback, during coursework in subject didactics of Language Arts, and had been presented for quality criteria of instructional scaffolding as defined by the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO; Grossman, 2015). During fieldwork, the candidates made video recordings of their attempts to enact instructional scaffolding with their students, selected clips for conversations with their mentor and peer, and made screen recordings of these conversations. For this study, we sampled and transcribed all the screen recordings of mentoring conversations that entailed video clips of the candidates’ feedback practice, in total eight mentoring conversations in which 21 video clips were discussed. The screen recordings captured both the screen used to display the videos and the audio of the candidates and the mentors as they discussed these videos. In order to build a contextualized understanding, we also triangulate the data (Johnson & Christensen, 2014) from mentoring conversations with data from individual semi-structured interviews with each teacher candidate and mentor (in total, six interviews of an average of 50 minutes). We conducted the analysis in four steps. First, we used Myhill & Warren’s (2005) three categories of critical moments (i.e., moments which created confusion in learning, moments which steered the discourse along a predetermined path, and moments which were responsive to student learning) as initial codes to identify critical moments address by candidates or mentors, and refined the codes in relation to the empirical data. Next, we applied Horn & Little’s (2010) analytical concepts normalization, specification, and generalization to code the candidates and mentors’ talk about each critical moment before coding every utterance within each episode of these broader categories inductively. Finally, we triangulated results from our analysis of the candidates’ and mentors’ talk about critical moments with their statements about progress in interviews, looking for patterns that mutually confirmed each other.
Expected Outcomes
Initial analyses of the mentoring conversations indicate that the candidates and their mentors addressed several critical moments in the candidates’ feedback practice videos. These critical moments were related to (1) how to support students who asked for concrete solutions or answers (telling vs. not telling, providing strategies, asking questions, exploring, checking for student understanding), (2) how to provide oral feedback in a language that students understand, (3) how to handle wrong answers and misunderstandings (correcting or exploring), (4) when to provide oral feedback about common challenges in whole class, and (5) how to create opportunities for providing oral feedback to students who do not ask for support. When investigating the characteristics of the participants’ talk about these critical moments, we found that critical moments which were responsive to student learning were generalized briefly in light of quality criteria of effective feedback. In contrast, critical moments in which the teacher candidates failed to support student learning were specified, generalized, and discussed more in-depth. A key finding, although preliminary, is that the candidates expressed new insights and intentions for further feedback practice if the talk about the critical moments included in-depth discussions of alternative solutions tied to hypotheses about student learning. The initial analysis of the interview data corroborates this finding, indicating that the candidates’ perceived such in-depth discussions as a way of unpacking the complexity of oral feedback practice, which in turn, according to themselves and their mentors, made them better prepared to manage related situations in the following lessons. To sum up, these preliminary findings indicate that the videos of the candidates’ feedback practice allowed for in-depth discussions about critical moments that, when specified, generalized and tied to hypotheses about student learning, created generative moments in which the candidates developed their understanding of the complex act of providing oral feedback.
References
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7-74. Gao, S., Liu, S., & McKinney, M. (2019) "Learning formative assessment in the field: Analysis of reflective conversations between preservice teachers and their classroom mentors", International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Gaudin, C., & Chaliès, S. (2015). Video viewing in teacher education and professional development: A literature review. Educational Research Review, 16, 41-67. Grossman, P. (2015). Protocol for language arts teaching observations (PLATO 5.0). Stanford University. Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112. Horn, I. S., & Little, J. W. (2010). Attending to problems of practice: Routines and resources for professional learning in teachers’ workplace interactions. American Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 181–217. Johnson, R., & Christensen, L. (2014). Educational Research Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Approaches Fifth Edition. van der Kleij, F., & Adie, L. (2020). Towards effective feedback: an investigation of teachers’ and students’ perceptions of oral feedback in classroom practice. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 27, 1-19. Myhill, D., & Warren, P. (2005). Scaffolds or straitjackets? Critical moments in classroom discourse. Educational Review, 57, 55-69. Prilop, C. N., Weber, K. E., & Kleinknecht, M. (2020). Effects of digital video-based feedback environments on pre-service teachers’ feedback competence. Computers in Human Behavior, 102, 120-131. Ruiz-Primo, M., & Furtak, E. (2006). Informal Formative Assessment and Scientific Inquiry: Exploring Teachers' Practices and Student Learning. Educational Assessment, 11, 205-235. Ropohl, M., & Rönnebeck, S. (2019). Making learning effective – quantity and quality of pre-service teachers’ feedback. International Journal of Science Education, 41, 1-21. Shute, V. (2008). Focus on formative feedback. Review of Educational Research, 78, 153-189 Sun, & van Es (2015). An exploratory study of the influence that analyzing teaching has on preservice teachers’ classroom practice. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(3), 201–214. van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–596. Walsh, M., Matsumura, L. C., Zook-Howell, D., Correnti, R., & DiPrima Bickel, D. (2020). Video-based literacy coaching to develop teachers’ professional vision for dialogic classroom text discussions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 89, 103001. Wisniewski, B., Zierer, K., & Hattie, J. (2020). The Power of Feedback Revisited: A Meta-Analysis of Educational Feedback Research. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 3087.
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