The Use of Classroom Visual Learning Analytics in Professional Development

Abstract

The use of digital technology has become increasingly widespread in the education sector. In this article, we describe how we used visual learning analytics of classroom videos in our year-long professional development program for secondary school mathematics teachers in Shanghai, China. The program introduced the knowledge and skills of classroom talk, aiming to change the teacher-dominated classroom culture. We used our classroom discourse analyzer to facilitate teacher reflection on their classroom practice. Using this kind of digital technology, the complex data of classroom videos became visual learning analytics and comprehensible for a review. This article focuses on the instructional changes of a novice teacher and an experienced teacher. After attending our program, the teachers changed their practice to some extent. Nevertheless, the novice teacher had a greater improvement compared with the experienced teacher in terms of the percentage of students' word contributions and the average number of words per turn in lessons. This article presents and discusses preliminary findings of our lesson analyses and teacher perceptions of our professional development program.