As a special education teacher, I have spent my career looking for points of entry—where my students currently are so that I know how to help them progress forward. To do this, I have to do a lot of observing, and really understanding the curriculum and the learning context students are asked to perform in. This goes for learning academic skills, shaping behavioral skills, and participating in social situations.
When I entered my career in teacher-preparation, I knew I would be teaching observational skills and observing for entry points to pre-service special education and general education teachers. I did not know, however, how much I would be performing and teaching the deconstruction of the “noticing” process related to teaching. 'Noticing' is being able to identify what a teacher does, and what a pre-service teacher sees as they observe a lesson (Mason, 2011). In my ten years in higher education, I have learned that pre-service teachers need a lot of guidance in what to look for as they enter the classroom and engage in pre-practicum observational hours. They need a framework to view the classroom from, otherwise they view it as they did when they were a student (from the student rather than the teacher’s vantage point). The framework selected (whether it be Danielson’s, a Differentiation Observation Protocol, a Culturally Responsive Teaching Rubric, or any other framework) needs to be unpacked and explicitly taught to pre-service teachers. If multiple frameworks are used, to look at teaching from multiple viewpoints, then they need to be taught in relation to one another, with one being the foundation to ground other frameworks onto. Without having framework and instruction on what to look for in observations, pre-service teachers give a literal play-by-play of what the teacher does in the classroom and judge these moves based on their perceptions of student compliance. This literal observation does not connect a teacher’s decisions and actions to the impact on student learning and a multi-dimensional view of student engagement (“active learning”). Therefore, when we send pre-service teachers in the classroom with the assignment to observe, they can not see and interpret what expert teachers are doing because they are in cognitive overload (Kim & Klassen, 2018). To help students do this we need to help pre-service teachers deconstruct the literal play-by-play of the lesson taking place and help them reconstruct it with meaning through teaching them to view the lesson in analytical chunks (based on the framework selected). When teacher preparation begins by teaching students how to unpack a classroom observation through looking at in through a particular framework lens it helps deconstruct all that is going on in a classroom. By looking through individual sections/aspects of a framework in isolation we are teaching how to chunk and categorize teacher actions and the classroom environment. Teacher preparation needs to deconstruct the classroom environment to “analytical chunks” that teachers can make sense of. We, first need to do this in teacher preparation, by stepping outside of own teaching and drawing attention to specific instructional moves we make and why we make them. This may require us (as teacher-educators) to step-back and reanalyze all of the moves that we make in the classroom. If we do this as we are teaching, we are modeling how to take the literal play-by-play of our own classroom interactions into analytical chunking through think-aloud moments that students can see in action. This lays the foundation for students to breakdown complex classroom teaching and learning. From here, we then need to move from the university classroom to calling out these moves as we help students view videos of grade and content-specific teaching environment. Again, this modeling is first done by the instructors as they call out what they see and make meaning of what they see in these classroom videos. Instructors then need to have pre-service teachers enter guided practice with this skill—as they watch videos with the instructor and as the instructor pauses the video at pre-planned and specific times. During these pre-planned stoppage points, guided questions are asked so that students can identify what took place and then make meaning. This step helps pre-service teachers develop a discriminating eye for significant classroom interactions through the lens of the selected framework (van Es & Sherin, 2002). By guiding pre-service teachers to look for specific actions and decisions the teacher makes, but doing so in a piece-meal fashion (with video stoppage points), pre-service teachers are able to take in what is happening in the classroom differently. With this guidance, and segmenting of a lesson, students are in an instructional zone rather than in cognitive overload. This is also the point where students are reconstructing their observational knowledge of the classroom—from a teaching viewpoint (rather than their old way of viewing classrooms, through the student viewpoint). In teacher-preparation, our job is to then take this one step further to solidify how pre-service teachers use noticing beyond the university walls, in actual practice. This needs to be done by having pre-service teachers independently practice this skill. This could first be done through assigned videos (selecting appropriate content and grade level teaching videos), and then through generalizing this skill into classroom observations out in the field. In teacher-preparation we shouldn’t be so quick to send students out in the field without teaching what we want students to see or “notice” in a classroom. By segmenting what students should “notice” and make sense of in a classroom through this direct teaching (as described above) we start to build a foundation for them to see the classroom differently. We also help them analyze the classroom through a more complex viewpoint that focuses on active learning/engagement rather than student compliance. This pattern of scaffolding instruction is what teachers should be doing with students so it only makes sense that pre-service teachers are taught “noticing” skills and how to observe in this same manner. In teacher-preparation we need to be better at finding the entry points to pre-practicum hours through identifying where our students currently are so we know how to help them progress forward. Kim, L. E., and Klassen, R. M. (2018). Teachers' cognitive processing of complex school-based scenarios: differences across experience levels. Teach. Teach. Educ. 73, 215–226. Mason, J. (2011). Noticing: Roots and branches. In M.G. Sherin, V.R. Jacobs, & R.A.Philipp (Eds.), Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers’ eyes (pp. 35 50). New York: Routledge. van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–595.
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