Investigating the development and enhancement of professional vision throughout teacher education
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Date
2025
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Abstract
The primary goal of teacher education is to equip future teachers with the competencies required for effective classroom performance. A central competency is professional vision, which entails noticing and interpreting relevant classroom situations and generating appropriate alternatives of action. This enables teachers to attend to teaching quality dimensions of classroom management, instructional support, and emotional support. Research on teacher expertise highlights developmental stages but also reveals plateaus, particularly when teachers enter practice. While models emphasize the importance of learning opportunities, their actual impact on professional vision remains ambiguous.
Article I replicated findings of stagnation in professional vision during the transition into practice and revealed no positive effect of learning opportunities. Instead, reflection showed a negative effect, underscoring the importance of the quality rather than the quantity of training. In response, practice-oriented approaches such as video-based analyses have been proposed. Articles II–IV investigated the application of instructional principles from cognitive load theory and cognitive theory of multimedia learning to video-based teacher training. Findings were mixed: complex classroom videos imposed high cognitive demands, future teachers had difficulties integrating multiple teaching quality dimensions, and their focus often remained on pedagogical aspects. Moreover, the effectiveness of instructional principles varied according to teachers’ expertise level and teacher education phase.
Overall, the dissertation shows that enhancing professional vision requires instructional designs tailored to both teachers’ expertise and the specific teacher education phase. Transferring instructional principles to the ill-structured domain of teacher education remains challenging, and future research must address how to better support the integration of pedagogical and content knowledge.
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Professional vision, Teacher education, Pre-service teachers, Cognitive load theory
Subjects based on RSWK
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