An investigation of relationships between elementary teachers' skills for analyzing videos of teaching and skills for lesson planning

Abstract

Designing a professional development program that supports teachers to improve multiple teaching skills is a complex endeavor. In this dissertation study, I outline an exploration of possible relationships between two teaching skills: analyzing videos of teaching and lesson planning. I used teacher noticing (van Es & Sherin, 2002; Sherin, 2017) as a framework to explain why these relationships might exist. To investigate this relationship, I used a subset of data from a research project that I was a part of for four years. The data included open-ended responses from participants to prompts that asked them to analyze video clips of teaching (other teachers’ teaching) and to plan a lesson by interpreting written curriculum materials. Both quantitative and qualitative findings supported the use of teacher noticing as a broader construct that can be applied to multiple teaching skills. Correlation analyses revealed that there was a relationship between teachers’ analysis of teaching video and lesson planning skills. Specifically, teachers’ ability to describe the key mathematics in the video aligned with their lesson planning skills. I qualitatively described two cases that were around the trend line for these skills, and these cases tended to demonstrate the same teacher noticing dimension for both skills. I chose two additional cases as extreme cases to describe qualitatively, because they provided counterexamples to the trends in the sample; their open-ended answers showed an understanding of what the trend did not look like. This study has implications for professional development designers and facilitators. When engaging teachers in professional learning, teachers would benefit from opportunities to make connections between multiple teaching skills to simultaneously support the improvement of multiple teaching skills. Finally, this study demonstrates how educational researchers can recognize interconnections between multiple teaching skills by using teacher noticing dimensions as a framework to interpret teaching skills, if relevant.