Helping Student Teachers Attend to Student Cues

With the aid of video, 5 student teachers (grades 1-4 and 6) were given practice identifying and interpreting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of their pupils, as the pupils listened to and participated in the student teachers' lessons. With continuous prompting the novices were able to relate student cues to class management and sometimes to instruction. However, instead of using student cues to evaluate their lessons from a student perspective, the student teachers continued to measure the success of their lessons in terms of their own affective states while teaching. Although they were often aware of negative student cues while teaching, each of the novices aborted impromptu changes in instruction for fear of losing class control. As a last resort during the final week of the study, we had each student teacher view and interpret one of the videos made in another novice's class. After completing this task, each student teacher then viewed again and reinterpreted one of her own videos. The results were successful with 4 of the 5 student teachers, who were finally able to disengage themselves from an egocentric focus and to critique their own lessons in terms of their pupils' responses. In sum, this study suggests that it would be useful to give student teachers access to one another's classroom performances, perhaps having them critique one another's lessons in pairs or in groups.