1. Using Video for Teacher Learning
Elizabeth A. van Es
University of California, Irvine
April 15, 2008

2. Question:
How can watching video of teaching be useful for someone learning how to teach?

3. Video Clip #1
Count the number of times the players on the white team pass the ball.

4. Video Clip #1
What does viewing this clip tell us about noticing?

5. Video Clip #2
Cubes Clip

6. Cubes clip What do you notice? Share in groups
Did you notice the same things? Different things?

7. What teachers noticed…
First thing I thought of was it’s a Catholic school. I noticed their outfits.
It was kind of an awkward group ‘cause they were standing around desks. When I do group work, everyone is seated around, whether it’s at desks or a table. Why would kids just be standing around?
The girls dominated. The boy was looking as if he wanted to be involved, except that [the girls] were running it. It would have been better if each student had a certain role to play in the group.
The manipulatives, the number blocks. I hadn’t seen those before. I’d like to use something like that.
They regrouped the blocks into 100s really quickly, the 25s into groups of 4. I think they worked with that before. There was a brief moment of confusion as to whether they were counting by 25s or 20s.
The teacher came over and wanted them to show her, at a glance, what they had. I’m I’m not sure if she was trying to get them to show piles of 100s. Maybe she wanted them to figure that out. I’m not sure if they were working on place value or counting.

8. Research on Teacher Learning in Video-Based Professional Development

9. Learning to Notice Framework
Identify what is noteworthy in a classroom situation
Use knowledge of one’s context to interpret classroom events
Make connections between specific events and broader principles of teaching and learning
In my work, I’m concerned with what teachers pay attention to and how they reason about what they see - what I call noticing.
I created a framework to examine teachers’ learning to notice. Based on the literature, we define learning to notice as the following:
First: noticing involves being able to identify what is noteworthy in a classroom situation. There’s a lot going on in a classroom. A teacher can’t notice everything with equal weight. Instead, a teacher decides where to pay attention at any given moment - this is what Frederiksen refers to as making a call-out and what Goodwin refers to as highlighting.
Second: noticing involves using knowledge of one’s context to reason about classroom events. Teachers use knowledge of their students, the specific content they teach, and their schools to reason about events they notice.
Third: noticing involves making connections between specific events and broader principles or issues of teaching and learning. This is what Shulman refers to when he argues that teachers be able to answer “What is this a case of?” The idea is that when teachers notice that some students are participating more than others, they frame that event as an issue of “equity.”

10. Learning to Notice Framework
Identify what is noteworthy in a classroom situation
What is important here?
Use knowledge of one’s context to interpret classroom events
How can I understand what is happening here?
Make connections between specific events and broader principles of teaching and learning
What is this a case of?
I think of these components as raising questions for teachers as they try to develop their skills at noticing, such as
- What is important here?
- Can I understand what is happening here?
What is this a case of?
Teachers’ responses to these questions provide insight into what teachers identify as noteworthy and how they reason about those events.

11. Characterizing Teacher Noticing
Four key dimensions of noticing:
Actor
Topic
Stance
Specificity
okay, so we have this noticing framework,
so what does that mean in terms of what people do when they pay attention to classroom video?
in my work, I look at four dimensions of noticing - let me tell you about each of these

12. Characterizing Teacher Noticing
Whom teachers notice:
Actor
Whose actions, comments, perspective do teachers attend to?
Student, Teacher, Other (e.g. Curriculum Designer, School Administrator)
The first two dimensions are concerned with What teachers notice.
In terms of the Actor, we want to know whose actions, comments, and perspective the teachers attend to.
Do they notice the student in the video or the teacher?
Perhaps they notice actors who are not physically present but influence what happens in classrooms, such as curriculum designers,
district administrators, or parents.
The idea is we want to know on which actor do they focus their attention.

13. Characterizing Teacher Noticing
What teachers notice:
Topic
What aspect of instruction do teachers attend to?
Climate, Management, Math Thinking, Pedagogy, Discourse
In addition, this framework points to what dimensions of classrooms teachers attend.
So, do they notice issues of Classroom climate or management or do they attend to the mathematical thinking
that’s happening or the pedagogical strategies displayed in the video?

14. Characterizing Teacher Noticing
How teachers notice:
Stance
What sense-making approach do teachers apply?
Describe, Evaluate, Interpret
Finally, we examine how teachers reason about what they see.
In particular, I consider both the stance and level of specificity - do they describe, evaluate or interpret the events they notice.
Describing is basically recounting the events that occurred.
Evaluating is making judgments about them - whether something was good or bad or could or should have been done differently.
And finally, interpreting is the act of making sense of a situation - trying to figure it out for deeper understanding.

15. Characterizing Teacher Noticing
How teachers notice:
Specificity
How specific are teachers when they view and comment on teaching?
General, oversimplifications of teaching and learning
Narrow, specific, evidence-based
Finally, how teachers support their analysis:
I think about this in terms of their level of specificity
How specific are teachers whent hey view video and comment on teaching?
Do they offer general, oversimplifications of tching and lrng
Or do they provide very narrow, specific, detailed comments and then use these
As evidence to support a claim they make about what’s going on in the classroom

16. Teacher Learning in Video Clubs
Group of teachers who get together to view and analyze video of each other’s classrooms
View 5-7 minute long segments that focus on student thinking
Facilitators or Teachers & Facilitators select clips to view
With in-service teachers, I’ve worked with Miriam Sherin, and we’ve designed and facilitated video clubs
and teachers come together to view and discuss video segments from each other’s classrooms.
In video clubs, we try to get teachers to notice student math thinking -
so we want them to identify interesting student ideas and then interpret these ideas,
trying to make sense of what a student said or did in the video clip.

17. Video Club Discussions
So let’s take a look at two segments from the video club meetings. First, I will show you a segment from an early meeting and one from the final meeting. In the first segment I will show you, the teachers had just viewed a clip in which the students were trying to figure out the degree of angles of different sets of polygons. Upon viewing the video segment, I asked the teachers, what do you notice? Here is their initial response [show Clip #1]
So, what we see in this clip is several teachers participating. They talk about the students, how they participated, there was a lot of talk about things did not occur in the video, such as, who the students are in the video and how they were ability grouped the prior year.
And I want to point out that this was typical of the kind of discussion they had early on in the year.
Now, let me show you a clip from a late meeting. In this segment, the teachers watch a clip of a student sharing at the board her method for multiplying the problem 8.0 x 0.2. [Show clip #2]
So, this clip is rather different. In addition to many of the social differences you may have noticed, the substance of their talk is different. Here, they are very focused on interpreting the students’ mathematical thinking and their comments are very grounded in what she did in the video segment.
“I noticed the enthusiasm.”
“Wait, you’re nodding like yes.”

18. Exploring Noticing in Interviews
Pre-interview:
Student, Climate,
Describe, General
“Students were engaged. You didn’t have just one child just sitting and watching and not contributing. They were all contributing.”
Post-interview:
Student, Math Thinking, Interpret, Specific
“Students were doing patterns. They were counting by 25’s. Someone said they were counting by 20’s. I don’t know if that child was confused, if she didn’t get it, but the other children in the group did and they got to 400.”
Another way we try to understand in-service teacher noticing is through interviews. In these interviews, we show the teachers short clips and upon viewing ask them “What do you notice?” We use this data as a way to characterize change in teachers’ noticing as they participate in different PD programs.
Here’s an example
Teacher watched a clip where a group of students are counting a large number of unifix cubes
And she says
QUOTE
She’s focusing on the student and on the classroom climate
In the post interview, after watching the same clip the teacher comments
So, using this framework, we are able to provide teachers with a way of characterizing their own noticing, and it’s also useful in helping us make sense of in-service teachers’ noticing in a professional development context.
Now, I will turn it over to Miriam who will discuss ways we’ve extended from this study to begin to characterize the nature of teacher noticing.

19. More recent work…
What might it look like to help teachers move from what they typically notice to attending to the particulars of student mathematical thinking?
So, in the research I’ve done with teachers, I’ve found that over time they shifted in tehir analyses of video -
adopting a very narrow approach to analyzing ST - they attend to student math thinking, they were interpretive and they were very
Specific in their analyses, refering to particular events in the clips they viewed and reasoning about those events.
So the question for me is:
What might it look like if to help teachers move from what they typically notice to attending to the particular of student math thinking?
Now it’s likely that the group of teachers didn’t just move from one approach to analyzing teaching to another.
In the work I’m currently doing, I’m interested in understanding what steps teachers take in their development, in learning to notice st.
And I want to break this down… in two ways:
First way - better understand - what it means to Notice ST-MT is: What are the elements/ components of attending to ST-MT
The Other - what it would look to move from this baseline to the a more analytic approach like I described previously…

20. Framework for Learning to Notice Student Thinking
Level 1
Baseline
Level 2
Expand
Level 3
Focus
Level 4
Extend
Actor
Topic
Stance
Specificity
And what I want to share now is a framework I created for moving from superficial to substantive analyses of ST.
On the y-axis - I identify aspects of what constitutes noticing -
This is broken down into two sub-categories that I described previously…
What is noticed: I think about this in terms of the Actor and Topic - (Actor refers to who is noticed in the clip and Topic refers to what they notice)
And in terms of how teachers reason: this broken down into the two categories - one is Stance (what discourse structure is used) & Specificity (the level of detail)
And across the top, we see 4 different levels - moving from Level 1 - Level 4 - I call them Baseline, Expand, Focus & Extend
Baseline is defined as where teachers start out and as they move through the levels they become more disciplined and focused in their noticing
(Have Rich give copies of Framework and talk through…)
In a recent paper I presented at AERA, I examined the development of the video clubs group noticing over time. What I found is that it’s not just a linear process - the video club group discussed here, they started at Level 1 in meetings 1 & 2, moved between Levels 2 & 3 in Meetings 3-8 and then Meetin 9 & 10, they were at level 4. This was encouraging but it also raises some important questions.

21. Research Questions
What trajectories do teachers in video-based professional development follow in learning to notice student thinking?
How does the design of video-based PD influence the trajectory a group follows?
How can this be useful for helping teachers learn to notice student thinking?
Some of which include…
What trajectories do teachers in VB-PD follow
How does the design of the VB-PD influence the trajectory a group follows?
How can this trajectory be made useful for helping teachers learn to notice ST?
From a practitioner perspective, can this framework be used to scaffold teacher noticing?
Also, teacher educators can use it as a guide to gauge tchr learning notice - where are they at different points in time and why…

22. Contact information:
Beth van Es

23. Characterizing what we see:
Describe
Try to capture in great detail all of the events that unfold
Evaluate
Make a judgment about what is good or bad, could or should be done differently
Interpret
Reason and make sense of what occurred; Draw inference and make meaning

24. Group Discussion How can it be useful to Describe what you see?
How can it be useful to Evaluate what you see?
How can it be useful to Interpret what you see?