Source: Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 18(1), 168-196.
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This article describes a case study, which documented the influence of preservice teachers’ (PTs') experiences in a Video-Enhanced Training Program (VETP) on their teaching.
Specifically, the authors sought to identify the influence of video viewing experiences by examining the PTs’ point of view.
Methods
The participants were 8 preservice teachers. They were in their second year of a 2-year master’s Physical Education program. The program includes both preparing for the written, oral, and practical parts of the French competitive examinations for recruiting Physical Education teachers and professionally training teachers. The participants worked alternating periods at the university with a University Supervisor (US) and periods in the classroom (student-teaching) with their school mentors (SM).
They participated in a VETP in April 2016 as part of this training. The VETP aimed to support the teacher training of PTs, in other words, to enable them to learn and interpret the rules.
The authors collected data through the recorded videos of each PT's lessons. Then, the authors conducted self-confrontation interviews (SCI) of the PTs with the videos of their lessons.
Discussion and Conclusion
The findings revealed that the Video-Enhanced Training Program (VETP) fostered the PTs’ ability to conduct a classroom activity. The authors found that the majority of PTS followed the rule taught in the VETP when they were teaching a lesson.
Furthermore, it was found that only when PTs could compare what they had learned with classroom events they were able to give professional credibility to the rule taught by teacher-educators, because only then they could judge the rule’s effectiveness.
The results also showed that PTs gave meaning to the events of a classroom situation by reacting to some of the experiential aspects of the exemplar they learned previously, which served as a meaningful link. The participants appropriated the rule by transforming it in the classroom to understanding what was happening and to adapt to circumstances.
In addition, the results revealed the kinds of experiences that influenced them, such as Video Analysis Experiences, Role Playing Experiences, Past Teaching Experiences, and Mentoring Experiences. This finding enabled the authors to further refine the VETPE-OE Explanatory Model.
The PTs also have a variety of experiences that enhance each other, and sometimes overlap and which progressively are forged into one personal experience, by nature complex.
The findings also suggested that this complex of experiences was forged over time. This finding indicated that this experience should be viewed as dynamic in nature. Thus, it is important to rethink how teacher educators organize broad teacher-training paths (VETP) in order to support the construction of this personal body of experiences.
The findings also show that the PTs’ following the rule in their teaching was influenced by an individual mix of experiences. These findings highlighted the importance of multiplying and diversifying the experiences of learning to follow a rule so that PTs can each shape their own experiential trajectory.
These results argue for a connection between initial education and classroom situations in order for PTs to establish a continuum of experiences.