Developing Pre-service Teachers’ Classroom-talk Competency through Video Visualisation

Background

Microteaching is an important pedagogical approach to developing pre-service teachers’ core professional knowledge. Within the term of our current Teaching Development Grant (TDG), we developed a technology-enhanced microteaching model, which includes peer review and reflection, to enhance pre-service teachers’ core pedagogical skills. One thing we have noticed is that, while students have improved their skills in general, their classroom-talk competency has remained unaffected. More specifically, their perceptions of the classroom talk that occurs during their microteaching does not always accurately reflect what is happening or align with teacher comments and peer reviews.

To solve this problem, we propose to include video visualisation technology to accurately capture classroom talk and thus facilitate students’ reflection. The next round of TDG funding will be used, first, to add functions to our current video visualisation technology; i.e., we currently use manual coding to analyse classroom interaction, but these funds would enable us to employ a combination of machine transcription and human coding. Second, it will be used to evaluate the impact of such technology in three teacher-education courses in HKU’s Faculty of Education, namely “BBED3201 Pedagogy I: Becoming a Competent and Reflective Teacher” and “BBED4202 Pedagogy II: Teaching Chinese in Putonghua and Teaching Putonghua as a Subject” for the BA&Bed (LangEd)-Chinese programme and “MEDD8840 Theories of Pedagogy and Teaching Practice” for the Master of Education programme.

Our training model with video visualisation technology will be shared with the teacher-training programmes in the Faculty of Education at the end of the project. The success of this project will be measured via: 1) an expert review of our training model; 2) students’ learning outcomes, i.e., change in the quality of their classroom talk and reflection; and 3) student feedback about the video visualisation technology.

Aims

To address the above issues, For more details, the specific objectives are as follows:

1. To add functions to the current video visualisation technology
2. To create a video visualisation-enhanced microteaching model for assessment, feedback, and reflection
3. To develop students’ classroom-talk competency
4. To improvement in students’ reflection skills
5. To develop students’ core teaching practices
6. To disseminate the video visualisation-enhanced microteaching model within and beyond the Faculty of Education

Project Collaborators

Principal Investigator :

Prof. LIN Chin-Hsi, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education’s Unit of Language and Literacy Education, HKU.

Co-Investigator(s):

Prof. CHEN Gaowei, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education’s Unit of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, HKU.

Dr. HUI Sau Yan, Lecturer, Faculty of Education’s Unit of Language and Literacy Education, HKU.

Ms. YEN, Miao-ju Louisa, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education’s Unit of Language and Literacy Education, HKU.

Video-based Professional Development Programs with the Emphasis on Classroom Talk

Academic Productive Talk (APT) – Classroom Talk Strategy

We have developed students’ classroom-talk competency by implementing APT classroom-talk strategies into three observed classes syllabus, instructing pre-service teachers to use it in their microteaching, and the use of APT will be an assessment for their class score. Based on the Michaels et al., (2008) Resnick et al., (2010) and Chen (2020) academically productive talk framework, we developed a four-part typology of effective teacher talk in the classroom. It consists of 1) elaborating, which encourages students’ elaboration of their own ideas; 2) reasoning, which encourages students’ deepening of their understanding; 3) listening, which encourages students to listen carefully to one another; and 4) thinking with others, which encourages students to explain whether they agree or disagree with others and their rationale of it.

We also created a set of videos with quizzes for APT training, we put the set of videos on Moodle, as TDG Classroom Interaction [2022] (link: https://moodle.hku.hk/course/view.php?id=100912). Students who registered for this class were asked to finish watching the 10 videos and complete the quizzes that have given after. A total score will be given, to indicate whether the students have watched and answered all the questions.

Visualisation-enhanced microteaching technology

• We added functions to the video-visualisation platform – V2elearn (link: https://v2elearn.com/melody/v2/introduction.html), which were discussion sections and Exercise Section. While the original Dialogue feature provides sectioned subtitles, and a , class-based. Every participant in the research project will be given their own account, by using the account, they could review their microteaching through the video visualisation technology. In our current system’s classroom-talk visualisation (Fig 1).

• (Refer to the Fig 2. above) The horizontal axis shows the talk turn number of a lesson, while each line on the vertical axis represents a speaker. An integer at the right side of each line indicates the total number of words of that speaker, and a percentage, in the same position, indicates the ratio of those words to the total number of words uttered by all speakers during the whole lesson. The video visualisation technology leverages data analytics and information visualisation techniques to provide preservice teachers with the following three types of affordances: 1) multiple representations, which provide multiple visual displays to represent the richness and complexity of video data, 2) interactive visualisations, which offer interactive, process-oriented visualisations to aid teachers’ data navigation and understanding, and 3) details on demand, which supply contextualized, visible evidence to support teachers’ evidence-based reasoning and discussion (see Chen, 2020).
• To facilitate the use of this visualisation technology platform, we created a guidance for instructors to master the use of this visualisation-enhanced microteaching platform(See link)

Training Module – Context

• The training intervention contained 12 sessions in the first semester of undergraduate and master degree courses in the Faculty of Education in HKU,  namely BBED4202, BBED3201, MEDD8840.
• The course generally contained: seminars with lectures, group activities, discussions, microteaching, and the sharing of teaching experiences in local schools.
• Components such as pedagogical theories, instructional design, classroom-talk competency, and instructional strategies were used to increase their Chinese reading teaching competence and confidence.

• The participants adapted the Classroom talk strategy in a 15-minute microteaching.

We have helped the pre-service teacher to gain the teaching core by microteaching, which added in each class provided the chance of practising the teaching core. According to the interview data, all of the participants felt satisfied with this in-class practice. And by combining microteaching with the use of APT, as the first time, the project has experimented the selection of teaching and use of classroom talk strategies.

• Classmates and instructors provided peer feedback on teaching.
• The recording of microteaching were transcribed and coded, then uploaded in the visualisation platform. Students received the results of video visualisation of their classroom talk one week after their microteaching.

We also collected and created 71 APT intensively used, coding, analysed, and video-visualised microteaching models. This could be useful as the foundation and the database of classroom research and teacher education in future.

• Students were required to submit a self-reflection report after the training.

• A total of 71 students who majored in Chinese language education and were enrolled in the course. Students were divided into three different classes according to their program and year of study. 70 students signed the consent forms, and 67 completed both pre-test and post-test. Moreover, 22 participants agreed to participate in the semi-structured interview.
• The scales of the questionnaires include: Teacher self-efficacy, Peer-review, Instructional motivational materials surveys.

Pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy, perceived value of peer feedback, and the positive attitudes towards training and the use of video visualisation technology are recorded significantly increasing after the training.

• The training promoted the self-efficacy of pre-service teachers.
• The pre-service teachers acknowledged peer review as a crucial element in pedagogical teacher training, and they gained a positive attitude and confidence in reflecting with their peers that went beyond traditional hierarchical relationships with expert teachers.
• They showed relatively high motivation after the training.

The dissemination of the findings of this project

• We shared the project’s outcomes at Faculty seminars. We held the first sharing to all tutors and professors at the Faculty of Education on May 16, 2023. The sharing included the detailed video-enhanced training strategies utilised in two undergraduate Chinese methods courses and one master’s-level course, with the achieved goal of improving pre-service Chinese teachers’ abilities to engage in productive classroom discussions.

• We shared our ongoing project process to a HKU-based poster showcase on 8^th November 2022.

• We signed up for the intra-disciplinary conferences, accepted by two conferences, one was held in May 2023, by Education University of Hong Kong, the other was held in Oct 2023, by Assoiciation for Educational Communications and Technology in the USA.

• We completed two manuscripts based on the project findings. One titled as “Video Visualisation of Classroom talk in a Pre-service Teacher Training Programme: Design and Implementation” has under- reviwed by Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) at this moment. Another titled as “Talking the talk: Unleashing Pre-service Teachers’ Classroom-talk Analysis and Reflection Skills through Video Visualisation-enhanced Training” is finalised, and ready to be sent to a journal soon.

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