Abstract
Professional vision, as the ability to identify important phenomena within what is observed, to ascribe meaning to them, and to reason about them in accordance with the available knowledge, is an important part of teachers' professional development, as their perceptions of teaching situations influence their decisions and actions, and thus the quality of their teaching. The study explores how professional vision is influenced by the part of university teacher education that includes mainly subject-didactic courses and teaching practice.
The development of professional vision was not targeted in any of the courses. The participants were future elementary teachers and future teachers of the English language, biology, mathematics, and art (N = 114).
The analysis of their written reflections of a video-recording of a lesson in the pre-test and post-test uncovered developments in both dimensions of professional vision, i.e., selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning. Student teachers at the end of their university studies commented significantly more on matters of curricula, subject, and subject didactics (there was no change in their focus on the pupils and their activities in the lesson) and commented more on concrete moments in the lesson as opposed to providing general comments.
Moreover, in the post-test, the student teachers evaluated the observed moments less frequently without justification; they explained the moments more, sometimes using theory (this shift was not statistically significant). This development of professional vision is desirable in terms of future teachers' professional development.
Missing shifts can be supported by specific interventions.