Student teachers' feelings when viewing their own videos and their peers' videos

Abstract

Video is often touted as a useful tool to promote teacher learning. However, studies examining the nature of teachers' activity during video-viewing suggest that learning from classroom videos is not an easy task. Amongst other factors, the type of video materials used (e.g., own or peer video) (e.g., Seidel, Stürmer, Blomberg, Kobarg, & Schwindt, 2011), the context of video-viewing (e.g., individual or collective viewing) (e.g., Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008) and teachers' affective responses (e.g., emotions provoked) (e.g., Sherin & Russ, 2014) can all influence what teachers pay attention to in the videos, and hence their learning from the videos. Prior research effort investigating teachers' video-viewing experience has mostly concentrated on the first two factors, few studies focused on teachers' affective responses during their video-viewing experience. While there are studies investigating the differences in emotional experience of in-service teachers when they are individually watching different types of video materials (e.g., Kleinknecht & Schneider, 2013), these studies rarely extend to studying student teachers (STs). This case study attempted to fill this gap by investigating the emotions of twelve STs who had little or no experience filming themselves and viewing their own videos. As part of their assignment, the STs video-taped their lessons during their teaching practicum. They viewed their own teaching videos and those of their peers to identify pedagogically significant events. STs' emotions during their video-viewing experience were elicited using questionnaires, open-ended surveys, and interviews. Analysis of the questionnaire data suggests that the STs expressed more negative emotions (e.g., disappointment, guilt) and fewer positive emotions (e.g., joy) when watching their own videos than their peers' videos. Coding of the open-ended surveys using the emotion inventory by Parrott (2001) reveals that, amongst the six primary emotions, the two emotions that STs had when watching their own videos were sadness and fear, while those experienced when watching their peer videos were joy and fear. The interview data illuminated the reasons for the differences in STs' feelings when they were viewing different types of videos. It was found that, when watching own videos, sadness was primarily triggered by incongruences between the STs' expectation of their own performance and their actual performance in the videos. Fear was mainly caused when STs noticed more shortcomings in their teaching during video-viewing. In the case of watching peers' videos, emotions were mainly provoked through comparison between STs' own teaching performance and that of their peers. Joy was evoked if the STs found that their own performance was comparable or better than those of their peers while fear was evoked when their performance in their own videos was perceived to be worse than that in the peer videos. These findings highlight the need to provide emotional scaffolds to STs for them to overcome their fear and sadness when watching their own videos and to shift STs' focus from comparing teaching performance to objectively analyzing the lesson per se when watching their peers' videos.