Noticing and weighing alternatives in the reflection of regular classroom teaching: Evidence of expertise using mobile eye-tracking

Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological development in video research is mobile eye-tracking (MET). It has the potential to provide fine-grained insights into teachers’ professional vision in action, but has yet been scarcely employed. We addressed this research gap by using MET video feedback to examine how expert and novice teachers differed in their noticing and weighing of alternative teaching strategies. Expert and novice teachers’ lessons were recorded with MET devices. Then, they commented on what they observe while watching their own teaching videos. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that expert and novice teachers did not differ in the number of classroom events they noticed and alternative teaching strategies they mentioned. However, novice teachers were more critical of their own teaching than expert teachers, particularly when they considered alternative teaching strategies. Practical implications for the field of teacher education are discussed.

Expertise and the work of football match analysts in TV sport broadcasts

In this paper we describe expertise as a way of seeing. We use match analysis `punditry’ as a setting to show how professional vision is interactionally achieved in TV sport broadcasts through environmentally coupled gestures enhanced by camera actions and a new technology of vision called telestrator. The paper is based on data from video sequences of (English) football TV broadcasts where the pundit shows to the TV host in the studio and to the non-expert audience at home what happened during a football match. We argue that the transparency of seeing is the product of an artfully instructed process whereby the pundit shows what should be seen, how it should be made accountable, and what the audience should expect in order to fully appreciate what they see. The paper shows how broadcasted match analysis expertise interactionally achieves this through the time-critical linking of talk, gesture, and technological environment.

Teachers’ Professional Vision: Teachers’ Gaze During the Act of Teaching and After the Event

To date most of our knowledge on professional vision has relied on verbal data or questionnaires that used classroom videos as prompts. This has been used to tell us about a teacher’s professional vision. Recently, however, new studies explore professional vision during the act of teaching through the use of mobile eye-tracking. This novel approach poses the question: how do these two “professional visions” differ? Visual attention represented by gaze was used as a proxy to studying professional vision (specifically its noticing component). To achieve this, eye-tracking as a data collection method was used. We worked with three teachers and employed eye-tracking glasses to record teacher eye movements during teaching (4 lessons per teacher; labelled as IN mode). After each lesson, we selected short clips from the lesson recorded by a static camera aimed at pupils and showed them to the same teacher (i.e., providing a similar setting as traditional studies on professional vision) while recording eye movements and gaze behavior data through a screen-based eye-tracker (labelled as ON mode). The two modes differ and due to these differences, comparison is difficult. However, by overlaying them and describing them in detail we want to highlight the exact variance observed. A comparison between IN vs ON condition in terms of dwell time on the same students in either condition was made using both quantitative (correlation) and qualitative (timeline comparison) methods. The findings suggest that the greatest differences in attention given to individual pupils occur when a pupil who was interacted with during the situation is missing from the view in the video recording. Even though individual differences are present in the patterns of gaze in IN and ON modes, the teachers in our sample consistently monitored more pupils more often in the ON mode than in the IN mode. On the other hand, the IN mode was mostly characterized by focused gaze on the pupil that the teacher interacted with in the moment with few side glances. The results aim to open a discussion about our understanding of professional vision in different contexts and about how current research may need to expand its outlook.

Systems leadership in the early years

This paper describes a new leadership coaching model that was delivered as part of Manchester city region's delivery of the Department for Education's Early Outcomes Fund. The coaching model explicitly paralleled the relational practices that are increasingly shaping early intervention policy and practice. Goodwin's theory of professional vision ( 1994 ) and Shotter's theorisation of with-ness ( 2011 ) provided the conceptual lens for this paper. The coaching facilitation aimed to afford the emergence of a new way of seeing leadership by scrutinising events of relational practice between participants in the coaching sessions (using video recording and review) and creating discursive practices using strengths-based analysis. We exemplify the coaching model using notes from a collaborative ethnographic evaluation of the six half-day group coaching sessions, surfacing how a new way of seeing silence may have seeded a new ‘object of knowledge’ in the group's emerging professional vision of leadership in the early years.