Videography in teacher education: A study on inclusive teaching competences

Summary

This dissertation set out to investigate student teachers’ inclusive teaching competence. Inclusive education is defined as the commitment to include all children regardless of their background in mainstream education by improving and adapting specific classroom practices to the individual needs of the learners (Vandervieren & Struyf, 2019). This depends on teachers’ use of effective inclusive teaching strategies, such as positive teacher-student interactions (TSI) or differentiated instruction (DI) (Mitchell, 2014; Watkins, 2012). As novice teachers feel rather poorly prepared for teaching in classrooms characterised by a highly diverse population of pupils, teacher education programmes have a major responsibility in preparing student teachers for inclusive education, making inclusive teaching an obligatory professional competence (Burns & Shadoina-Gersing, 2010). With regard to preparing student teachers for inclusive teaching, several authors plea to urgently reconsider teacher training models in such a way that they are strongly characterized by an integration of theory and practice (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005). A competence-based approach to teacher education that promotes both student teachers’ knowledge as well as certain attitudes and skills, is exemplary in this context. This dissertation builds on Blömeke and colleagues’ (2015) conceptual framework on teacher competences in which competences are viewed along a continuum. Dispositions are situated on the left side of the continuum, which ultimately result in performance on the right side of the continuum, through situation-specific skills. With this conceptual framework, Blömeke et al. (2015) argue for a broader view on measuring and developing competences by combining different measurement approaches and by tapping into different competence aspects. In particular, they plea for more attention to situation-specific skills as these processes are responsible for the transition of dispositions into performance. In response to this, this dissertation focuses on student teachers’ professional vision as a skill that grasps their perception and interpretation of crucial events in an instructional setting (e.g. Seidel & Stürmer, 2014; Sherin & van Es, 2009). Professional vision involves the perception or identification of important classroom events, defined as ‘noticing’, and the ability to interpret these events based on knowledge and experience to make instructional decisions, defined as ‘reasoning’ (Goodwin, 1994; Sherin, Russ, Sherin, & Colestock, 2008). Student teachers’ professional vision is put at the centre of this dissertation, in accordance with Santagata and Yeh (2016) who theorize it as at the core of supporting student teachers’ learning and their competence development. Moreover, Blömeke et al. (2015) have stressed that competence assessment should always be sampled in connection to real-life instructional situations typical for performance demands in the field. In this respect, video-based instruments have become a prominent tool in assessing teacher competences as they help to contextualise assessments (e.g. Alonzo & Kim, 2016; Kersting, 2008; Seidel & Stürmer, 2014). Video-based measurement approaches are especially useful for assessing professional vision (Seidel & Stürmer, 2014; Sherin & Van Es, 2009; Sherin, 2007). Moreover, video is not only used as tool for assessment, but also to understand and support competences (Calandra & Rich, 2015; Gaudin & Chalies, 2015). Though research on the use of videography within the context of teacher training is growing, empirical studies that explicitly centre on the effectiveness of videography for measuring and developing student teachers’ inclusive teaching competence is lacking.