SCIENCE TEACHERS' LEARNING TO NOTICE FROM VIDEO CASES OF THE ENACTMENT OF COGNITIVELY DEMANDING INSTRUCTIONAL TASKS

Members of a profession develop a professional vision that enables them to see and understand complex situations in particular ways. This study focuses on developing science teachers’ professional vision by supporting their learning to attend to particular classroom interactions and make sense of them in particular ways. Specifically, this study investigated high-school biology teachers’ learning to notice in a professional development (PD) setting from video cases that depict classroom interactions during the enactment of high-level, cognitively demanding science tasks. A seven-session, video-based PD intervention in which teachers analyzed short video clips that illustrated students’ engagement with cognitively demanding tasks was designed and implemented. The findings focused on changes in teacher noticing from pre- to post-PD as revealed through the analysis of two sets of baseline and exit interviews with each individual teacher as well as the analysis of particular PD sessions. According to the findings, there were mostly significant changes in what teachers attended to in the video cases and how they made sense of what they saw. In addition, there was a shift towards connecting the specifics of what they noticed in the video cases to the level or kind of student thinking as outlined in the Task Analysis Guide in Science framework. The findings are promising in terms of developing science teachers’ professional vision of classroom interactions during the enactment of cognitively demanding tasks. The study findings provide implications for designing effective PD programs to support teachers’ professional vision