Developing observation skills in pre-service teachers: Results of a pilot intervention based on the use of the Video Library of Good Teaching Practices

Abstract

A key aspect of pre-service teachers training is students' participation in real-life educational contexts. However, students' access to these experiences is limited and training programs face practical limitations to fully mediate these experiences. This article comes from a research project aimed at developing an online repository of classroom videos. The web platform, named Videoteca de Buenas Prácticas Docentes, is expected to enhance students' access to mediated observation of real-life classrooms. The present study introduces the design, implementation and evaluation of a teaching model supported on international training experiences. The specific goal was to develop observation skills and knowledge based reasoning among students. A pre and post video observation task was carried out, and data were processed using content analysis. Results show advances in participants' ability to observe and reflect on classroom videos, focusing on the student-teacher-content triangle, and improving their observation stance from general description to specific ones, and also interpretations.