Video analysis
Amr Kammoun
Human Development and learning theories
Dr. Mohammad Elnagdi
20/4/2019
Classroom Video Analysis
Introduction:
This
paper aims to describe and analyze a teacher classroom practice during a whole
session. The
paper will highlight the classroom settings, the session learning outcome, and
the learning strategies through which the student will acquire the new
information, knowledge, and skills. To dig deeper into the teacher's practice,
this paper will try to explore the learning theory behind each activity. To do
so, the paper will proceed by first describing the classroom setting second the
video will be cut into snippets. Each snippet will contain a certain phase in
the lesson or activity. And for each snippet, this paper will try to explore
the learning theory behind each activity assigned to the students to do. This paper
will end by a conclusion section to reflect on the teacher practice and will
introduce also some critics.
In
this learning situation, the teacher refers to a variety of learning theories,
but the main dominate theories are behaviorism and social-constructivism. She
succeeded as we are going to see through her classroom session analysis, to
combine those two learning theories to reach her pre-set learning goals for the
session.
The settings
The
educational settings for this classroom lesson are suitable to achieve the
session learning outcome which is “Ordering food at the restaurant”. Suitable
as it is, the physical environment of the classroom does not seem so rich. The
room where the lesson takes place is big with two big entries through 2 large
doors. In the front side of the classroom, on the wall, appears the South
Korean flag. The classroom has enough space for movement. There are large
windows on two sides of the classroom with roll-down curtains that allow
manipulating the lighting. So, the lighting can be controlled. The students can
have a well-lit and dimly-lit classroom. There is a wall-clock hanged on
the right wall. On the left wall, there is a fan.
In
the front side of the classroom, there is a large green chalkboard and the
teacher desk which is equipped by a lab top. On the same side at the right,
there is a screen that is large enough connected to a data-show device. Also,
in front of the class, there is a table with one chair. It seems that it is
brought in the classroom to be used in the role-play activity.
I think that the students' age is about 14
or 15 years old. The students are sitting on light chairs around rectangular
tables in clusters. Each group has 5 or 6 students on each table. There are
about 35 students in the classroom. Each table has one desktop computer.
In the back of the classroom, there is
another board where papers can be stacked too. Between the tables, there
is enough space for the teacher and her assistants to circulate. The teacher
has two assistants. It seems to me, although the scene in a Korean
classroom, that the teacher is an Indian female. She has two female assistants
with a Korean nationality.
The
class, through its left side windows, overlooks a garden. It seems that it is
winter. The teacher, the students, and the guests are putting heavy clothes. As
for the students’ clothes, they are in uniform. The acoustics seem to be
good. the sounds are clear whether it is the teacher sound, the students sound
or the computer sounds.
Video
snippets
Snippet 1
In
the first snippet, the teacher is trying to reactivate the students' prior
knowledge through some strategies like brainstorming and posing questions also
she related the recalled vocab through a context which is a restaurant. The
teacher introduces some keywords to the students and asks them to repeat aloud
after the teacher. In this snippet 4
learning strategies are used as an entry to the lesson about ordering in a
restaurant: reactivation, brainstorming, posing questions, contextualize the
activities.
1-Reactivation
The
teacher tries to benefits from the students’ prior knowledge about the topic of
the lesson to build new knowledge and linguistic skills. Here the teacher makes
use of the cognitive theory of Piaget who calls this prior knowledge "The
Schema" (Shing
& Brod, 2016, p.153). Through this
activity, the teacher may also discover the Korean students' perception of
restaurants because the topic of the lesson which is food and restaurant
has its cultural dimension.
Reactivating
the students’ prior knowledge about the lesson topic will help students to
memories the incoming information: by recalling the prior solution, the teacher
is activating the schema (cognitive structures) into which the new knowledge
will be integrated. That will facilitate the memory processing of new information
(Shing & Brod, 2016, p.154).
2-Posing questions (stimuli-response-reinforcement
for the right answer)
So,
the tool or the strategy that the teacher uses to reactivate the student's
prior solution is posing questions. Questions in that scene play the role of
stimulus that invites the students to respond. This is purely behaviorism, the
learning theory that builds learning on the association between stimuli (from
the teacher) and the right responses (from the student)
By using questions to
invite students to respond, as doing so, the teacher depends on the concept of
contiguity of Guthrie which is pairing in time between stimulus and
response (Schunk, 2012, p.85) and
when she praises the students for the correct answer by doing so she refers to
the low of the effect of Thorndike which aims to prevent unlearning or
forgiveness. And also, to reinforce the retain of the correct answerer for
those students that have forgotten and did not revise their lesson before
coming to the class.
Praising the students after
producing a correct answer is very related to the skinner’s operant
conditioning which states that reinforce a behavior make it tends to be
repeated or reproduced (McLeod,
2007, p.1).
4-Contextualization
The
teacher begins the learning process at the very beginning of the session by
contextualizing the whole fowling activities by saying ‘we are going to speak
about going to a restaurant'.
The
teacher uses images in this phase. According to Allan Paivio imagery is
centrally important in facilitating long-term retention which allows the
learner to stores information in two different modes: imaginal and verbal (Broudy, 1987, p.
12).
Snippet 2
In
the second snippet, the teacher introduced directly the key expressions that
will help lead the students to the main activity in the lesson which is role
play. Instead of inviting the students to deduce those keywords through a
reading activity for a dialogue transcription between a client and a waiter in
a restaurant, the teacher wants to save time and introduce those key
expressions directly and invite students to memorize them by two learning
strategies imitation and repetition. When saying imitation and repetition
the behaviorism learning theory appears.
The teacher by asking the students to
repeat after her the key expressions, in fact, she is in the behaviorist camp
and she is trying to build up an effective linguistic intuition, and
acquisition of these key expressions by repetition and drilling (Demirezen, 1988, p. 139). By using imitation and
repetition the teacher is using the basic strategies of language learning
according to behaviorism which are imitation, reinforcement and rewarding
(Demirezen, 1988, p. 138). As the video shows, she asks the students to imitate
here and repeat after her. The reinforce and the rewarding come at the end of
each repetition by praising words and sentences like “good, good job, very
good…”
Although
the teacher, in this snippet, uses the imitation and repetition which are
stand-alone strategies, she always keeps the student in context, by making them
aware that they are in the context of a restaurant and that those key expressions
are used to order food as she declared in the very beginning of this snippet.
The students know that they imitate and repeat after the teacher to memorize
and retain the key expressions in order to be used later in a dialogue.
Snippet 3
In
snippet 3, the teacher keeps contextualizing the key expressions but this time
by inviting the students to read them in a dialogue between a waiter and a
client. This kind of contextualization depends on the fact that Learning
words in a narrative way or in context cause elicit activity detected by the
FMRI on both sides of the brain not only in the left hemisphere when learning
isolated words (Society for Neuroscience, 2018, p. 39) or expressions. That’s
why the teacher, introduced new key expressions in a dialogue between a waiter
and a client in a restaurant context More brain process on the new information
might make it last.
Snippet 4
From
the first snippet to the 4th one the teacher is scaffolding the
students. She did not give the students the key expressions and asked them
immediately after to make the dialogue.
She began by helping the
students to reactivate their prior knowledge about the topic and then she
introduced the key expression and invited her students to do some active
learning activities to internalize the key expressions.
Continuing
her scaffolding role, in the 4th snippet, the teacher describes
the task that the students are going to do. And she invites them to do the
first activity to fill the blank in a text depending on a menu given to her
students. She still helping her students to internalize the basic linguistic
elements necessary to do the main task which is the role play that will take a
big part of this snippet.
Doing
so, the teacher refers to the scaffolding concept of Vygotsky defined by
Hammond, & Gibbons, (2005) in the context of classroom interaction as:
“the
temporary assistance that teachers provide for their students to assist them to
complete a task or develop new understandings so that they will later be able
to complete similar tasks alone.” (Gibbons, 2005, p. 9).
That is what exactly the
teacher is doing. She is preparing the students to do much more complex task in
the following snippet which is role-playing.
As
it is clear the modality of the student work in this snippet for the activity
of filling the black was in groups. Here we can notice the social
constructivism approach that the teacher chooses to her students to do this
task.
The
student knowledge is constructed through two types of interaction: teacher/students
and students/students. That what can be seen in this snippet. The first
type of interaction teacher/students can be clearly noticed by the teacher
explaining the tasks to the students and his movement in the classroom,
she and her assistant, to facilitate the work of the students.
The
second type which is students/students can be easily noticed through the
collaboration between the students while accomplishing the task. Social
constructivism views that social group learning and peer collaboration are
useful for learning (Schunk, 1996, p. 235).
Snippet 5
As for the role play, the students try to be prepared
for the activity of role play because they will be personally involved in the
situation in front of the class. The teacher, by choosing this activity, refers
to the experiential learning or learning by doing of John Dewey which is based
on three hypotheses. The one related to this snippet that students learn more
effectively when they are involved in the learning experience (Ord, 2012, p.
55).
In this snippet also, the teacher considered all
learning styles. She invited students to read, to listen and to play a role.
So, the additive, the visual and the kinetic learning styles are all active in
this snippet. Learning styles describe how learners perceive, interact with,
and respond to the learning environment. Many researchers have argued that
knowledge of learning styles can be of use to both educators and students. It
is well noticed that the teacher did not miss this side. She tried to take into
account when preparing her classroom activities, all her students learning
styles. There were reading activities, listening activities. (Romanelli, Bird,
& Ryan, 2009, p. 9).
In this snippet also the observational learning can be
noticed through the students observing their two classmates doing the role play
activity. By observing their classmates, they can gain knowledge and skills
concerning the role play activity and they might also do some regulations due
to their observation. Observational learning refers to Bandura. Observational
learning will motivate students to pay attention to the desired skill to retain
it and produce it also (Schunk, 1996, p. 126).
Snippets
6 & 8
In snippet 6 and 8, the teacher does what she did in
the snippet 2. She tries to insist on the key expressions that are essential to
the lesson learning outcome by inviting her students to imitate her and repeat
after her. In this snippet as in
the second one, the teacher refers to the theory or imitation which is
according to Rosenthal and Zimmerman as cited in () an important way to
transmit behaviors or knowledge.
So, through imitation which is considered as a
stimulus for the following response in addition to the encouragement of the
teacher which refers to the operant conditioning theory the teacher seeks to
consolidate the memorization of the key expressions (Schunk, 1996, p. 12) and transfer them from the
short-term memory to the long-term memory.
Snippet
7
In this snippet, the teacher refers to gamification. And she begins this snippet by explaining to her students the game rules. Gamification is strongly related to motivation. A body of research suggests that games may increase intrinsic motivation levels when they make boring tasks interesting (Faiella, & Ricciardi, 2015).
The game that the
teacher introduced to her students put them in a behaviorism learning camp. The
feedback delivered by the machine makes the student learning depend on the
association between stimulus, introduced by the machine and the student’s
response. To be more accurate the Skinnerian operant conditioning here plays a big
role. When feedback, given by the machine, is positive it reinforces the right
response and makes it tend to be repeated in the future. And the negative
feedback aims to extinct the wrong response. Here the talk is about the
positive and negative reinforcement. (McLeod, 2007).
Snippet 9
In the last snippet, the teacher declares to students that they will receive a spelling test in the week that follows. She is trying to make learning last in her students’ memory by more exposing the content to the student. To pass the spelling test, the student will have to read and study the content more than one time so they will not forget it.
In fact, all the learning theories and the
learning strategies and techniques revealed in this session were in light of
the mastery learning theory. The teacher in this session adopted the mastery
learning theory which claims that all students can master most of what they are
taught in the classroom (Block,
& Anderson, 1974). In mastery learning theory a very important
component is the attainment of self-confidence (Block,
& Anderson, 1974). It seems that’s why the teacher always
encourages, praise and celebrate the student's achievement after each activity
to increase the students' self-confidence to achieve the learning outcome.
To increase the students' self-confidence
the teacher also divided the learning outcome in very small chunks, like words,
sentences, filling the blank, and role play. She was progressing bit by bit in
order to scaffold her student to master the "ordering food in a
restaurant" in a foreign language which is English in our current case.
Learning
for mastery implies that the learning process begins where the learner is and
help him to reach where he should be. And that what the teacher did during this
session. She began to form the student's prior knowledge and she progressed slowly.
Also,
the evaluation component in mastery learning (Block,
& Anderson, 1974). That implies that the teacher uses varied
assessment tools carefully to assess students’ progress in learning.
Conclusion
The
classroom session addressed in this analysis was rich in terms of learnings
theories, learning strategies, and techniques. Although that the teacher can be
clearly classified as a behaviorist and social-constructivist teacher, she referred
to a variety of learning theories such as Piaget cognitive theory, the concept
of contiguity of Guthrie, the observational learning of Bandura, mastery
learning theory and the other learning theories mentioned previously in this
paper.
The
teacher succeeded to be behaviorist and social-constructivist at the same time
during the whole session. All the learning theories, teaching and learning
strategies revealed in the session aimed to help students to master the
linguistic knowledge and skills needed to achieve the preset learning outcome
of the session which is “ordering food at the restaurant”.
Despite her best
efforts, some critics could be noticed in the session. The discussion of the
critics will be in the next section.
Critique
One
of the critics for this session is about the role-play activity. In fact, it's
not a role play activity. It is more about verbalizing the written dialogue. A
real role play is to provide the students with the description of the
situations that they are going to simulate and let them prepare themselves and
then let them act or play the roles without a pre-fixed dialogue that the
student sticks to.
The
second one that the teacher did not allow the students to discover and deduce
the information, the knowledge, on their own, like give them a video
at the beginning of the session and let them discover the key expressions
of the topic. She was always introducing the new information
directly to the students and train them to master it. I think that
our teacher mainly a behaviorist teacher although she varied the adopted
learning theory, behaviorism was dominant in this session.
Also,
she introduced the wrong information to her student. The key expression
"Entrée" does not mean the main meal. It is a French word that points
to the first thing introduced in the meal, like a salad for instance.
References
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