Source: Journal of Teacher Education 61(4): 339-349. (September/October 2010).
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This study investigates the impact of the Lesson Analysis Framework (LAF) on preservice teachers’ abilities to analyze lessons through an experimental design.
The intervention was implemented as part of a course in the teacher preparation program for secondary teaching at a large public university in Italy.
Through stratified sampling based on gender, 34 preservice teachers enrolled in the course were assigned to the LAF and TRF groups.
That is, a random half of the male preservice teachers were assigned to the LAF group and the other half to the Teaching Rating Framework (TRF) group. The same procedure was followed for the female preservice teachers.
Of the participating preservice teachers, 22 were female and 12 male.
They all had a laurea degree (comparable to a U.S. master’s degree) in a scientific discipline (67.6% were mathematics majors, 11.8% physics majors, 11.7% statistics and economics majors, and 5.9% engineering majors).
The participants’ prior teaching experience was minimal and limited to temporary teaching appointments or substitute teaching. Both types of degree and teaching experience were evenly distributed across groups.
LAF and TRF participants were administered a pretest prior to the intervention. They then applied one of the two observation frameworks to the analysis of a videotaped lesson and completed the posttest.
The findings revealed that participants who used the LAF as a lens for reflecting on a videotaped lesson during an intervention improved their unprompted analysis of a novel lesson after the intervention, whereas the reflections of participants who used an alternative framework, the TRF, did not change over time.
LAF group participants’ reflections became more productive in that they included more elaborated comments. These comments integrated various elements of teaching and evaluation of teaching that was supported by evidence from the video
In addition, LAF participants’ reflections on teaching tended to prompt them to consider more alternative instructional strategies.
Finally, LAF participants also showed a tendency to become more critical and improved in their ability to describe the alternatives they proposed, whereas TRF participants’ descriptions did not improve over time.
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