Collaborative Interpretation of Classroom Interaction

Collaborative Interpretation of Classroom Interaction

Introduction

Within a “community of interpretation” experienced teachers, university students and teacher educators collaboratively analysed videotaped classroom episodes taught by these teachers and students. The focus of analysis was on interaction in mathematics lessons and on the contin­gency of and alternatives to the course a lesson may take. The community members gradually developed the capacity to systematically penetrate the surface of classroom practice and to use explicitly criteria for estimating the pupils' opportunities to learn mathematics. In the paper, we conceptualise the socially distributed action patterns of teachers and students, who, within the community of interpretation, learn from and for practice. Referring to the concept of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger 1991) we accommodate Raeithel's (1996) ethnography of co-operative work to collaborative interpretation of classroom interaction. The significance of collaborative interpretation for professional education and development consists particularly in establishing a re-centring stance of legitimate self-regulation, thus clearing up the widely known ambiguity of centred/de-centred perspectives of practice and observation.

Analysis

Based on these two assumptions we offered a 14-weeks mathematics education course, in which 5 teachers (from two primary schools, teaching 3rd and 4th grade mathematics) and 13 university students studying for a career as primary teacher took part. Participants were divided into stable subgroups of one teacher and two or three students each. The teacher and the two or three students met one day of the week in the school of the teacher. There, students observed the interaction between the teacher and the pupils and among pupils, videotaped parts of the lessons, prepared themselves (supported by the teacher) for teaching the class and taught the class (observed by the teacher).

The whole group met one day of the week at university for, what we call, collabora­tive interpretation of classroom interaction. For each of these meetings, one subgroup selected about 15 minutes of videotaped (and transcribed) classroom interaction from the mathematics lessons in their school. The task of the whole group then was to reconstruct the interactional dimensions of the 15-minutes-scene. The goal was to analyse what happened in the episode, to find markers why things went as they went, and how the course of interaction could have developed differently -- eventually with optimised learning opportunities for the pupils. The analysis aimed at uncovering the contingencies of the supposed natural and seemingly inevitable course of a lesson.

Interpretation of videotaped classroom interaction is not trivial a task. If approached on the basis of common sense the videotape scenes do not look radically unusual and there seems nothing to be discovered under the surface. It is not before starting to scrutinise the videotaped interaction systematically, that is to say using techniques for focussing on specific dimensions of the interaction, that one can see alternative paths through the possible ramifications of teacher(s)' and students' talk. For instance, some pupils' utterances that on the first view appear to show a lack of understanding of the mathematical problem to be tackled prove to be thoroughly rational, sense making ...