Professional vision is the lens through which effective teachers view their classrooms. By noticing key classroom moments, thinking critically about their importance, and responding thoughtfully, teachers can better meet the needs of their students. But good professional vision needs to be developed over time. Which leads to one crucial question: how?
The research into developing professional vision
A brilliant recent study explored how watching real-life classroom videos under different conditions can help student teachers develop their professional vision. In this case, they focused on three main skills of teacher professional vision:
- Noticing – The ability to focus on important classroom moments. When watching classroom videos, expert teachers notice more by paying more attention to student behaviour, while novices tend to focus on the teacher.
- Reasoning – The ability to explain why a classroom event is important. Experts tend to provide more detailed explanations based on their deep knowledge, whereas novices give more surface-level descriptions.
- Generating Alternatives – The ability to suggest different ways a teacher could respond to a situation. Generally, expert teachers generate more alternatives than their novice counterparts.
To investigate how teachers can best develop these three skills, researchers had 280 student teachers watch a series of classroom videos over five weeks. Some read relevant materials before watching the videos (concepts-first condition), while others were provided these readings afterward (casework-first condition).
What the researchers found
So, let’s take a look at what this study found:
1. All groups experienced improvements in teacher professional vision
Overall, student teachers developed better noticing, reasoning, and alternatives generating skills. Specifically, student teachers identified 18.2% more important classroom moments, improved their explanation scores by 27.2%, were 29.3% more aligned with experts on the multiple-choice quiz, and provided 14% more alternatives after the training intervention.
This aligns with past research showing that watching classroom videos helps develop professional vision, suggesting that the video intervention was primarily responsible for improving teacher professional vision.
2. Those provided with prior readings attained better reasoning scores
Student teachers in the concepts-first groups scored slightly higher on their final multiple-choice quiz than those in the casework-first groups. This suggests that giving your staff relevant readings before watching the videos helped them. The readings likely gave them a clear focus, helping them pay attention to key concepts while watching the classroom interactions.
How to apply this to your in-house professional development
Studies like this suggest that video observation and analysis can be a great tool for self-development.
Videos are a great way to model the skills involved in developing teacher professional vision and can effectively improve teachers’ noticing, reasoning, and solution-generating skills
This is one of the reasons so many schools and colleges are telling us they are using our Teaching Unpacked series. In it, Doug Lemov analyses, spotlights, and highlights key strategies from real live lessons.
This serves two main benefits:
- It models the strategy in action – this ensures that CPD isn’t abstract and vague. Now, it is relevant, tangible and practical. This means it is more likely to be understood and implemented in your setting
- Expert analysis – by having an absolute legend like Doug pinpoint what he sees when he watches classroom footage, it ensures that nothing is missed. Often it is the subtle little details that make all the difference.
Final thoughts
Professional vision is the skill that underpins all future decision-making. To help make brilliant decisions in the moment, you have to be able to quickly and accurately assess what is going on. And then be able to make brilliant decisions based off that.
As it stands, live video modelling offers one of the best bets to accelerate the development of this professional vision. By seeing what others do, it gives us the chance to reflect on what we would do. As a result, good decision-making becomes automatic in the classroom.
