The role of digital video and critical incident analysis in learning to teach science

Abstract

In seeking to understand how teachers learned to teach, Shulman and Shulman (2004) identified five dimensions upon which an accomplished teacher has developed: ready (possessing a vision), willing (motivated to sustain teaching), able (competent to enact pedagogical content knowledge) reflective (learning from experience) and communal (acting as a member of professional and learning communities). Of these, reflective thinking about teaching practice has been shown to be essential for learning and professional growth (Dewey, 1933; Schön, 1983; LaBoskey, 1994; Zeichner & Liston, 1996; Posner, 2000). Important aspects of reflective teaching include the ability to notice salient teaching or learning events, analyze them for meaning, connect the incidents to broader contexts, question assumptions, and then consider how the outcomes of the reflection process might affect future actions (Tripp, 1993; van Es & Sherin, 2002; Griffin, 2003). While research has documented a variety of methods used for promoting preservice teachers’ reflective thinking (Sparks-Langer, Simmons, Pasch, Colton & Starko, 1990; Jay & Johnson, 2002; Spalding & Wilson, 2002; Hewitt, Pedretti, Bencze, Vaillancourt & Yoon, 2003; Whipp, 2003), one promising avenue for research in this area focuses on the use of digital video technology as an agent to mediate reflective practice (Myers, 2004; Sherin & VanEs, 2006). The first author has completed three studies in which preservice teachers produced written reflections on video taped lessons, two of which involved participants in editing their video taped lessons prior to reflective analysis (Calandra, Brantley-Dias & Dias, 2006; Fox, Brantley-Dias & Calandra, 2007). In the present study, we interpret preservice teachers’ reflective thinking resulting from analysis of a videotaped lesson carried out with the scaffold of a reflection guide and debriefing interview but without the requirement that they edit the tape when identifying critical incidents.