Integrating video analysis of teacher and student behaviors to promote Preservice teachers’ teaching meta-strategic knowledge

Abstract

Teachers need to notice and interpret student behavior as part of their everyday classroom work. Current teacher education programs often do not explicitly focus on helping pre-service teachers learn to analyze and interpret student behavior and understand how it may influence teachers’ teaching behaviors, which in turn may affect students’ thinking and achievements. Using a quasi-experimental design, the current study examined a systematic reflective approach promoting dual learning from both teacher and student perspectives in authentic videotaped classrooms. More specifically, the study examined how this dual reflective “professional vision” framework influenced pre-service teachers’ actual ability to explicitly teach meta-strategic knowledge (MSK) to students. Results indicated that pre-service teachers whose video-analysis reflected on both teachers’ and students’ behaviors demonstrated greater improvement in their MSK-teaching, and their students showed better MSK achievements, compared to pre-service teachers whose video-analysis reflected only on teachers’ behaviors. The current study suggests the need to integrate systematic dual reflective professional vision approaches – that analyze not only teachers’ but also students’ behaviors – into teacher preparation programs as a means for developing pre-service teachers’ capacity to promote students’ MSK.