Subject Specific Professional Vision of English Language Teaching Students: Development of noticing and reasoning about expert phenomena in accordance with experts as a result of video clubs based on indirect observation of others' or one's own teaching
Abstract
The study is focused on the topic of developing subject specific aspects of professional vison through differently designed video clubs in the context of English language teacher education. The video clubs differ primarily in the type of video recordings used and reflected upon during the video clubs, either of video recordings of own or others' teaching.
Aims: The aim of the research was to reveal the influence of individual video clubs on students' ability to notice and reflect on important didactic phenomena. In both the content and process dimensions of professional vision, the consistency of student teachers with experts' perspectives was also investigated.
Methodology: Unstructured written refl ections of students written before and after the video clubs were fi rst analysed by deductive content analysis according to a proposed categorical system in order to identify the parts of the reflections devoted to important didactic phenomena. Subsequently, the selected parts, i.e. idea units, were analysed through the perspective of the characteristics of the individual expert phenomena, and then their (dis)correspondence with the experts' view. The second perspective of viewing the identified expert phenomena was to code them with the categories of the process dimension of professional vision - the categories of description, evaluation, explanation, theorization, alteration, and prediction. In the case of the categories of alteration and prediction, the quality of the statements was again examined in relation to their (dis) correspondence with the reasoning of the experts.
Results and conclusions: Different types of video interventions were shown to have different effects on the development of students' didactic thinking. For example, the systematic selection and subsequent observation and reflection of video recordings of other teachers' teaching practice develops the ability to identify multiple subject specific phenomena and to theorize about them; on the contrary, sharing, observing, and reflecting on one's own individually planned and realized teaching develops the so-called depth of noticing different characteristics of defi ned expert phenomena in accordance with experts. In the case of noticing the characteristics of expert phenomena and students' ability to suggest alternative approaches, the factor of time also emerged as important.