Digital Video for Teacher Education by Calandra Brendan Rich Peter J

Author:Calandra, Brendan, Rich, Peter J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Reflection on the Mapleton Video Discussion

This excerpt illustrates several moves the Mapleton facilitator used to take advantage of the affordances of video to achieve the goals of the club and to address some of the challenges of using video for teaching learning. These include highlighting, redirecting, pressing, and modeling. One of the central challenges for teachers is learning to attend to the mathematically noteworthy aspects of students’ thinking. Throughout the conversation described above, the facilitator highlights for the group what is worth seeing about Alberto’s mathematical thinking. After the initial conversation about whether Alberto knows his multiplication facts, the teachers shifted the conversation to talk about several issues peripheral to the clip—students’ general difficulties retaining math facts, the use of particular lessons and materials to support student learning, and the influence of tracking and testing on student learning. The facilitator stepped in and redirected the group back to the video and highlighted what was noteworthy—that Alberto uses different strategies for multiplication. To emphasize this point, she highlighted two or three strategies that were captured in the video. These moves, redirecting and highlighting, help focus the group on the noteworthy features in the clip and provided a frame for what is worth attending to in their video club work and also during their daily teaching—how students think about the mathematics.

A second challenge using video is getting into the particulars of the video to unpack and reason about what is observed. Throughout the segment, the facilitator pressed the group to point to moments in the clip to ground their analyses and further elaborate and examine student thinking. For instance, toward the end of the excerpt, when Wanda claimed that Alberto was building on a strategy he used for the first set of cards he drew to solve a later problem, the facilitator pressed Wanda to explain her thinking. These questions prompted Wanda to return to the details and articulate her thinking based on what she observed. Similarly, at the beginning of the excerpt when Daniel claimed that Alberto does not know his times tables and two teachers began to talk about how hard it is for him to memorize his math facts, the facilitator interjected and said, “But I want to push Daniel. What do you mean he doesn’t know his times tables?” Again, this question pressed Daniel, and the group, to provide evidence for his claim about Alberto’s understandings and to further explore this idea. We conjecture that such pressing helps teachers develop a disposition of curiosity about what they observe, the sort of disposition that research suggests is worthwhile for adopting a student-centered approach to instruction.

Finally, we observed the facilitator modeling how to use video as an artifact to learn about student thinking. Through modeling, the facilitator helped the teachers learn how to use the video as a source of evidence for their claims and conjectures. Several times in the discussion of this clip, the facilitator pointed out particular places in the transcript where the group should look to further explore the ideas under discussion (e.

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