Shifting the reflective focus: encouraging student teacher learning in video-framed and peer-sharing contexts

Abstract

Since many studies that use video to support teacher learning are situated in strongly guided contexts and encourage particular kinds of thinking, we still know very little about how more loosely guided contexts can support teachers to think about the dilemmas of practice associated with their own goals by reflecting about video. This study explores how video-based and peer-based reflections about one’s own and others’ practices both indicate and guide the development of teachers’ change-directed thinking when they are sequenced before supervisor feedback. Six secondary preservice teachers reflected about peer-evaluated mini-teaching and videotaped field-based teaching in the prestudent teaching term and then about videotaped teaching alone, with peers, and alone again with supervisor feedback in the student teaching term. These reflections were coded by their subject, degree of reform-mindedness, and tendency toward three foci (player, stance, and source). Patterns in their ‘higher focus’ codes across the three reflective resources during student teaching showed how teachers were developing the goals they espoused in the fall term. Teachers situated their learning in contexts where the degree of scaffolding matched their degree of readiness for change, which was better characterized by their tendency toward subjects and foci that were less ‘one-sided’ than by their tendency toward only reform-minded (standards-based) thinking. While teachers whose reflections were intermediately different from the peer group were better supported by it, most teachers found direct support from the self-video and/or peer-video contexts to advance change-directed thinking associated with their own goals for teaching. The findings reveal not only how goal-related teacher learning can be powerfully supported with loosely guided video-framed contexts, but also how the diversification and/or expansion of teachers’ reflections across the categories used in this study provide robust indicators of both the content and efficacy of their change-directed thinking.