Classroom Events Research Articles

Language teachers’ emotions in online classrooms: Relations among teachers’ appraisals of classroom events, emotional responses, and instructional practices

Drawing upon Frenzel’s (2014) framework of appraisals, the current study explored language teachers’ emotional experiences and their antecedents in the online teaching context. Moreover, the interrelations between teachers’ emotions and their instructional practices were also investigated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eleven language teachers from a top-tier international university in China. Our findings revealed that positive appraisals of online classroom events, including goal attainment, the capacity in and responsibility of effectively delivering lessons online, and the importance teachers attached to online teaching, tended to result in positive emotional experiences, which consequently led to motivational stimulations in more creative and productive instructional practices. By contrast, teachers who had negative appraisals of online teaching events tended to experience more unpleasant emotions and emotional vulnerability, which would possibly impede effective instructional practices and steer their teaching towards more traditional teaching methods. Our study contributes to the understanding of the relations among teachers’ appraisals of classroom events, emotional experiences, and instructional practices in online language classrooms. Implications for how to prepare teachers emotionally for online teaching are also discussed.

TEC-Q: A tool to sort out teacher emotions in the classroom

This article introduces the Teacher Emotions in the Classroom Q-sort (TEC-Q) as a systematic means to identify different combinations of teacher emotions within the classroom settings. Reflecting six discrete emotions, the TEC-Q was implemented using a sample of 40 secondary school teachers who performed a card-sorting task. The participants were divided into three groups based on their shared emotional profiles, namely bridging engagement and enjoyment, from misbehavior to the mix of anxiety and anger, and pride with tempered enjoyment. The findings revealed diverse emotional profiles which highlight the complex interplay between teacher emotions and classroom events.

Improving Teachers’ Professional Vision Through a Video-based Reflection Program: A Case Study in Mexican Primary Schools

Enhancing teachers’ professional vision (TPV) may contribute to increasing the quality of teaching-learning processes through higher perceived efficacy, leading to autonomy-supportive environment. This is of particular importance in Physical Education (PE), due to the fact that this subject presents different challenges and more dynamic situations compared to others. One of the latest approaches for enhancing TPV is video-based reflection, which allows teachers to observe recorded lessons and analyze them. The aim of this research was to test the effect of a video-based reflection program on TPV in PE. Two teachers participated in a 3-step video-analysis program consisting of self-reflection, peer reflection, and expert feedback. Notable changes were found in TPV at the end of the 6-month intervention, both in terms of teachers’ selective attention to classroom events and their knowledge-based reasoning. Our findings suggest that video-based reflection programs could represent an important part of any teacher training program aiming to increasing PE teachers’ responsiveness to diverse in-class situations.

Perezhivanie-agency dialectic: Examining Vietnamese EFL educators’ experiences and negotiation of dramatic classroom events

Tensions and conflicts are common in teachers' everyday professional lives, yet research on how these experiences influence pedagogical decisions and teacher agency remains limited. This study employs a broad sociocultural perspective, integrating cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and Vygotsky's concept of perezhivanie, to examine how two Vietnamese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) educators responded agentively to emotionally charged events. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The findings of the study illustrate that mismatches between educators' expectations and students' behaviors not only underpin educators' negative emotions and cognitive responses but also catalyze a cycle of reflection, which subsequently leads to modifications in teaching practices and strengthens educators' agency. This study underscores the complex interplay between teachers' experiences of dramatic events and their agency, highlighting the importance of equipping educators with the necessary knowledge and skills to constructively manage difficult emotions and enhance their problem-solving capabilities. This study exemplifies a critical integration through the development of Integrative Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (iCHAT), which synergistically combines elements of CHAT and Vygotsky's perezhivanie, providing a robust framework to investigate a range of complex phenomena beyond teacher agency in diverse educational and cultural contexts.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants’ Understanding and Practices of Equity

Undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) are near-peer instructors that facilitate learning by engaging in student-centered, active pedagogies, and often engage in more direct contact with students than faculty. Despite their important role in STEM classes, little is known about how ULAs understand and practice equity. Instructors’ understanding of ‘equity’ directly impacts their teaching practices. Instructors with ‘equality’ based conceptions of equity that prioritize fairness and treating each student the same are more likely to adopt didactic, instructor-centered teaching practices that have been shown to less effective than other approaches, with disproportionate impacts on students from minoritized backgrounds. Further, in making sense of racial disparities in their classes or disciplines, STEM faculty often draw on color-evasive narratives that explain racial phenomena without explicitly naming race or racism as a cause of oppression and these beliefs are associated with a reduced ability to notice racist events in the classroom and with the adoption of harmful equality-based approached to teaching and mentoring. STEM faculty are not alone in drawing on color-evasive narratives. Undergraduates also hold these beliefs, and those that do are less likely to recognize microaggressions or to find them problematic. Thus, we ask (a) How do STEM ULAs at a Mid-Western primarily white institution conceptualize equity in their role as educators? (b) How do ULAs conceptions of equity influence their self-reported teaching practices? We hypothesized that a majority of LAs will draw on color-evasive ideologies, and those that do will be less likely to notice racist events in classes, more likely to perpetuate inaccurate descriptions of their classes as neutral and objective and more likely to endorse teacher-centered practices. Drawing on frameworks of color-evasive racism, Haynes’ White Racial Consciousness and Faculty Behavior model and the four approaches to equity proposed by NASEM, we qualitatively coded the data from surveys and interviews to assess LAs’ understanding and practices of equity. We find that LAs engage with color-evasive in several ways: They explain racist classroom events without naming race or racism, ascribe to equality-based understandings and practices of equity or inclusion-based understandings and practices that focus on individuals’ characteristics and needs while ignoring historical, sociopolitical and systemic causes of inequities. By delving deeply into how STEM ULAs perceive and implement equity, our work informs future interventions and training programs to enhance equitable teaching practices in STEM education. This work is supported by a Creating Inclusive Excellent Grant from Michigan State University. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.

Teacher reflection as a research method: using phenomenology to reflect on classroom events

ABSTRACT Arguing that teacher reflection on events as a research method is necessary for naming unrecognized values and moral responsibility that have informed current practice, I apply phenomenological reflection to an event with a child from my own classroom experience, recorded through autoethnographic writing, to show how the significance of this revealed itself in its latency, bringing into nearness the originary and eidetic insights of this lived pedagogical encounter. I do this utilizing two insight cultivators – ‘essential a posteriori’ (the ‘too late’), and responsive contact. This type of autobiographical reflection is important for teachers because what is remembered, while often present in the form of fragmentary and unconnected scenes, informs educators in terms of who they are now, that is, who they have become.

Enhancing dual language learners’ language learning through parent–teacher partnerships

Families of dual language learners (DLLs) and their linguistic resources play a crucial role in fostering children’s language development. However, there is still a dearth of empirical studies investigating whether bilingual teachers view the families of DLLs and their language resources as assets, and how they implement family engagement practices to leverage these language assets in teaching DLLs. This study examined the family engagement perspectives and practices of five bilingual teachers in New York City (NYC) early childhood classrooms. Qualitative data were collected using online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that bilingual teachers hold a strength-based view of DLLs’ parents and their language resources to support their children’s language learning. Controversially, they demonstrated a mixture of deficit- and strength-based approaches to parental engagement, ranging from educating parents about English homework strategies to arranging classroom events in which parents could highlight their home language practices. Concurrently, teachers were fully aware of the importance of DLLs’ home linguistic resources in supporting students’ language learning, yet they maintained instructional practices that kept DLLs’ home and school language repertoires separate. The implications for fostering strength-based perspectives on DLL families and strength-based DLL family engagement strategies are discussed.

More I-talk in student teachers’ written reflections indicates higher stress during VR teaching

Video-based reflection on one's own teaching represents a crucial tool in teacher education. When student teachers reflect on negative classroom events, it elicits “self-focused attention,” which has been associated with more intense negative emotionality. Self-focused attention can be quantitatively captured using first-person singular pronouns (“I,” “me,” “my”) in written reflections by, for instance, student teachers. What is unclear is whether student teachers' use of these first-person singular pronouns in their written reflections is linked to and predicts their negative affective experiences during teaching. For the present study, a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) classroom was implemented in which student teachers taught a lesson, provided written reflections on their teaching, and then taught a second lesson. We measured N = 59 student teachers' self-reported stress and heartrate responses while teaching in the VR classroom and determined the percentage of first-person singular pronouns in their written reflections. Firstly, our results showed that the use of first-person singular pronouns provides incremental information on manual ratings of student teachers' foci in their written reflections. Secondly, student teachers' heartrates during instruction—a measure of physiological stress—were associated with the use of first-person singular pronouns in subsequent written reflections. Thirdly, the use of first-person singular pronouns predicted the increase in physiological stress from the first to the second round of VR teaching. We discuss implications for automated feedback and for designing reflective tasks.

Pre-service and in-service teachers' professional vision depending on the video perspective—What teacher gaze and verbal reports can tell us

Teachers are involved in complex teaching situations every day; thus, they must understand what to pay attention to in the classroom, how this information is to be interpreted, and which teaching decisions become necessary as a result. In educational research, these competencies are known as “professional vision.” The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the professional vision of pre-service teachers (PTs) and in-service teachers (ITs) by investigating whether the groups differ in what they notice and how they reason about videotaped classroom events; whether the perspective of the video viewed influences their noticing and reasoning; and to what extent their gaze behavior differs from their verbal statements. Thirty-one PTs and twenty ITs watched a video clip of authentic teaching, shot from different perspectives, and their visual focus of attention was recorded using a remote eye-tracker. Subsequently, participants reported in an interview what they had noticed. The triangulated data show that the gaze behavior of the PTs and ITs did not differ, but the content of their verbal statements did. Depending on the video perspective, participants focused on different subjects, but this difference was not reflected in the verbal data. Thus, the gaze behavior and verbal statements are not consistent. The findings indicate that considering multiple sources and types of data is beneficial to explore professional vision and that further research is needed to understand the concept in depth.

Attending to what prospective teachers notice about students' intersecting identities

AbstractTo develop an equity‐centered orientation in teacher education programs, it is essential to recognize what prospective teachers (PTs) attend to in classroom events and how they relate these events to mathematics instruction. We examined how race‐gender intersections of a child (Black boy, Black girl, White boy, and White girl) in a written vignette shape PTs' noticing. Using an intersectional noticing lens, we analyzed PTs' responses with respect to race‐gender intersections. The results indicated how racism and sexism can permeate PTs' implicit bias, positionality, and social expectations, which continue to oppress Blacks and girls within mathematics teaching and learning.

The traumatic aspect of naming: Psychoanalysis and the Freirean subject of (class) antagonism

Deploying a Lacanian conceptual framework, this article interrogates the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Paulo Freire’s dialogical method of critical pedagogy. The paper advances the claim that the transformative efficacy of Freirean dialogue is rooted in its unique ability to confront and engage the repressed element of trauma, or what Lacan calls the real. The author suggests that the locus of trauma stands as the elusive, yet central and constitutive axis around which Freire’s dialogical engagement turns. Following psychoanalysis’ attention to biography, the paper first examines how Freire’s personal experience of exile informs his philosophical orientation to being, politics, and education. Turning to a specific classroom event Freire outlines in Pedagogy of Hope, the paper then develops a new interpretation of Freire’s idea of naming, and through Lacanian analysis, extends Freire’s insight on the relationship between psyche, ideology, and social antagonism. Pushing the idea of class subjectivity in Freire beyond its familiar determinants (namely as an ‘identity’), the paper resituates the notion of radical subjectivity in critical pedagogy as the effect of a traumatic loss or gap in the sociosymbolic order of being. The author argues that the ‘naming event’ in Freire is formally rooted in an encounter with this unconscious gap. To conclude, the paper offers critical educators some new points of departure for conceptualizing the transformative labor of problem-posing dialogue.

Interpreting prospective teachers' responses to inequities in a written vignette: A plan for action

AbstractTo develop an equity‐centered orientation in teacher education programs, it is essential teacher educators recognize what prospective teachers attend to in classroom events and how they relate these events to mathematics instruction. In this study, we conceptualize the Equity Noticing Framework and use it as an analytic tool to examine what prospective teachers notice in a classroom vignette focused on cultural and racial biases. The Equity Noticing Framework focuses on understanding what prospective teachers recognize—or overlook—as bias, oppression, and privilege that permeate educational systems, analyze those events that contribute to inequities, and support prospective teachers in becoming change agents who implement strategies that can eradicate systemic barriers. The results from this study reinforce the importance of devoting time to supporting prospective teachers to become more cognizant of their own beliefs about equity and equitable mathematical practices and providing opportunities to analyze these beliefs through research‐proven attitudes and practices.

Body in motion, attention in focus: A virtual reality study on teachers' movement patterns and noticing

When people navigate a space to perform tasks, their body and eye movements are closely linked. Within the classroom context, characteristics of teachers' body movements may be related to the noticing of relevant classroom events, in particular, visual attention to student disruptions. In the current study, we investigated this relationship in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) classroom that offered a standardized environment for tracking teachers' body and eye movements. Based on time series data collected during a short teaching task with 21 preservice teachers, we conducted K-means clustering with body movement features. We identified three distinctive patterns, which we labeled as immobile, anchored, and dynamic (body) movement patterns. Teachers with dynamic movement patterns venture away from the teacher's desk to far corners of the room; they don't dwell in one location for long but rather move continuously to various parts of the classroom, creating a dispersed movement. Dynamic movement patterns were associated with the best visual attention performance, defined as the number, speed, and duration of fixations on a classroom disruption. Our findings demonstrate the existence of unique and differentiable movement patterns among preservice teachers that have implications for teacher noticing, teacher–student interaction, and instructional quality.

The “Unruly” Snowflake: (Re)imagining School Readiness for Two-Year-Old Children

Engaging with Posthuman theories this article puts to work concepts of affect, bodies, and voice to reimagine an ordinary classroom event of making cards for families and carers. The article will outline how Human Capital Theory and neoliberal logic can reveal how specific ways of demonstrating learning are privileged in practice. To challenge the dominant discourse, and the binary of ready/not ready, this article makes a call for an intra-active posthuman pedagogy, so that time in space can be slowed down to follow the agentic rustles of material voices and bodies to (re)imagine school readiness.

Modeling teachers’ reactions to unexpectedness

BackgroundEven experienced teachers make inconsistent classroom decisions in unexpected situations. From the cognitive load theory perspective, the effective handling of the novel, unexpected events by teachers depends on the cognitive load of the task, the teaching context in which the unexpectedness appears, and the available cognitive capacity. AimsTeachers’ reactions to unexpected mathematical events, in particular the unexpectedness of the arithmetic calculation, was modeled, investigated experimentally, and explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive load theory. Sample64 mathematics teacher trainees took part in the experiment. MethodsIn a dual-task arrangement, participants verified alternative answers to simple mathematical questions while memorizing task-irrelevant information. The answers represented low (schematic good responses), and high (unexpected good responses) processing load conditions, and control condition (incorrect responses). The memory load was low or high representing levels of extraneous load. The participants’ cognitive capacity was estimated by a complex working memory span task. ResultsThe verification of unexpected but correct answers was slow and more error-prone as compared with the processing speed and accuracy of schematic answers, presumably due to elevated processing (intrinsic) load. The increase in memory load resulted in slower and more inaccurate verifications. However, working memory capacity was found to mediate the extraneous load effect. ConclusionsThe results stress the importance of well-organized schemas for effective reactions to unexpected classroom events. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of accurately understanding and being aware of the impact of cognitive load on teachers to improve teaching practice.

Instructional quality in science teacher education: comparing evaluations by chemistry pre-service teachers and their advisors

ABSTRACT Evaluating and improving instructional quality is important in pre-service teacher education, given it is a crucial factor for students’ learning gains. This process is complex and involves multiple classroom events with various interpretations. Criteria for instructional quality are rarely applied systematically in teacher education, leading to divergent evaluations and hindering comparable development. Comparability has rarely been researched in science pre-service teacher education. Therefore, we compared evaluations from 17 chemistry-specific advisors and 17 science pre-service teachers with regard to their choice of criteria, their respective rating and grading of a videotaped chemistry lesson, in Germany. Their evaluations were compared using the Science Education Perspectives (SEP) framework for instructional quality. Although advisors can be considered evaluation experts, our findings show differences in the choice of criteria, ratings, and how the lesson was graded within and between both groups. Pre-service teachers focused more on aspects of classroom and time management, and gave higher average ratings, whereas their advisors focused more on cognitive activation. Overall, 16 different criteria were used by the majority of participants. These criteria show a strong science-specific focus. Our findings have implications for science pre-service teacher education, showing a need for a common approach in evaluations, with extended observation periods.

‘Literacy for labour’ in the competency-based VET in Finland

ABSTRACT In Finland, the vocational education and training (VET) qualifications lead into work. Also, active citizenship is one of its aims, and qualification enables application to tertiary study. In terms of these aims, literacies are central. In the context of competency-based VET, we analyse how a curriculum of literacy is realized during literacy lessons. The theoretical background lies on sociocultural understanding of literacies as social practices, and this article discusses the school subject of literacy representing theoretical knowledge in competency-based education. Methodologically, the paper draws from feminist ethnography, and the analysis focuses on examining language use in recurring classroom events. We analyse ethnographic data from the literacy lessons for the car mechanics and building construction programmes (2018–2020). These are programmes with an overrepresentation of male and working-class-based youth. The analysis highlights that during the lessons, the value of literacy manifested as market-oriented and work-relevant ‘usefulness’, and the literacy curriculum was realized as delimited to labour contexts and topics. There was an imperative of motivation for conducting literacy schoolwork which draws on stereotyped notions of students who are seen as not interested in literacy but in longing to labour. Based on this analysis, the literacy curriculum was realized as ‘literacy for labour’.

Hybrid classroom approach: Virtual and live field data integration

AbstractUniversity students stepped into synchronous remote learning as the COVID‐19 pandemic arrived in spring 2020. Temporal limitations of the live field trip‐based paradigm in teaching ecology have been complicated by remote learning. To meet the challenge, we have designed and deployed an immersive virtual ecology platform with associated field explorations and data analysis using a 360° video apparatus and software applications augmented with wildlife camera trap videos and aerial drone images at Washington State University in an undergraduate Natural Resource Ecology class. Throughout four semesters (fall 2020 to spring 2022) of synchronous online instruction, students have been using the virtual platform simulating the natural landscape at Kamiak Butte County Park. The immersive virtual ecology platform provides students with (1) access to broader learning comprehension of abiotic and biotic landscapes; (2) ability to collect and analyze tree data to describe differential woodland site characteristics; (3) visualization of native wildlife habitat uses; and (4) guidance through virtual field instruction tasks. With softening of pandemic restrictions in 2022, we designed the immersive virtual ecology platform in conjunction with in‐person learning. This proof‐of‐concept article briefly summarizes the steps followed in creating this blended delivery curriculum using a hybrid field trip experience in combining virtual data discovery with live field trips and classroom events.

Evading Race: STEM Faculty Struggle to Acknowledge Racialized Classroom Events.

Undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms are not race-neutral spaces, and instructors have the power to center racial equity and inclusion in their instructional practices. Yet how instructors think about race and racism can impact whether and how they adopt inclusive practices. We examined how 39 undergraduate STEM instructors noticed anti-Black racialized events that were experienced by students in classroom narratives. We created narrative cases that described multiple common, harmful anti-Black racialized experiences based on extant research and guidance from an expert advisory board. Instructors responded to cases by describing the problems they noticed. Using frameworks of racial noticing and color-evasive racial ideology, we conducted qualitative content analysis of instructor responses. Color-evasive racial ideology was pervasive, with most responses (54%) avoiding any discussion of race, and few responses acknowledging race or racism in more than one event (10%). We characterized six forms of color-evasiveness. This study adds to a growing body of literature indicating that color-evasion is pervasive in STEM culture. Instructors would benefit from professional development that specifically aims to counter color-evasiveness and anti-Blackness in teaching. Furthermore, STEM disciplines must pursue systemic change so that our organizations value, expect, promote, and reward the development and enactment of a critical racial consciousness.

Conceptualizing Dialogic Literary Argumentation: Inviting Students to Take a Turn in Important Conversations

Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.