the teacher to increased attention to students’actions and ideas, and that the teachers’
analyses of student ideas grew to be increasingly detailed. van Es and Sherin ( 2008 )
focus on the challenge for teachers to develop a professional vision (i.e. teachers’
ability to notice and interpret significant features of a practice) and claim that
learning to notice, the development of professional vision, consists of three main
aspects: (1) identifying what is important in a teaching situation, (2) using what one
knows to reason about the situation and (3) making connections between the specific
events and broader principles of teaching and learning.
There have been a large number of studies on in-service teachers’video clubs
(Sherin and Han 2004 ; van Es and Sherin 2008 ), but less research on how students
can collaboratively analyse video from their own school experiences. Therefore,
this study might provide a methodological contribution to the way teacher
knowledge (i.e. PCK) is captured and enhanced.
In the video clubs for this particular project, the students were encouraged to
focus on what happened during the lesson, how the teacher made their learning
possible and how the teacher communicated the content in a way that made it
accessible for them as learners. During the video clubs, 12 students (three groups of
four students) participated voluntarily in the collaborative reflections. In order to
stimulate the students’reflections, a research assistant (a student teacher) partici-
pated to ask questions (e.g. what within the teachers’teaching actions help or
constrain your learning processes and why?), and to challenge the students’ideas
when analysing the video. The research assistant was familiar with the students and
she had carefully explained to them that her intention was not to assess or“judge”
the teacher, but to learn more about how the teacher’s way of handling the content
also had an impact on the students’learning.
The video clubs were held in a separate room in the school and the atmosphere
was relaxed. The reflections in the video club were conducted as a semi-structured
interview, which both allowed the research assistant to ask prompting and chal-
lenging questions and provided an open space for the students’own thoughts and
reflections. The video clubs lasted for about two hours and all three sessions were
video recorded and transcribed verbatim to provide a deep analysis of the aspects
that the students brought up in their reflections. The qualitative data obtained from
the video clubs provided insights into the students’experiences of what aspects
within their teacher’s teaching that helped them in their learning. The video clubs
were conducted after the school day. Hence the students participated during their
free time. Therefore, it was decided that only one lesson should be video recorded.
However, even though the study covered only one particular lesson, it still provided
the opportunity to make an in depth analysis of both the video-recorded lesson and
the 6 hours of video clubs.
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