Abstract:

This study investigates how teacher educators (TEs) distribute their professional noticing when reviewing their own lessons in 360° virtual reality (VR) and what distinct noticing profiles emerge in this immersive environment. Fourteen higher-education TEs participated in VR-based stimulated-recall interviews in which they watched a 360° recording of a self-selected “typical” lesson using a headset and engaged in think-aloud reflection. Transcripts were segmented into 1415 meaning units and coded into three pedagogical dimensions (students, TE, classroom) and two modes of noticing (attending, interpreting), together with comments on VR experience. Normalized category frequencies were computed per participant and analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests to address RQ1, which examined how TEs distribute their attending and interpreting across students, the TE, and the classroom; followed by an exploratory k-means cluster analysis to address RQ2, which investigated what distinct quantitative profiles of professional noticing emerge from these distributions.

Findings show that when attending and interpreting were combined, TEs distributed their noticing relatively evenly across students, themselves, and the classroom. Yet dimension-specific tests revealed a differentiated pattern: participants attended significantly more than they interpreted in the student and classroom dimensions, whereas in the TE dimension, they interpreted significantly more than they attended. Within attending, they focused significantly more on students and the classroom than on the TE; within interpreting, they interpreted the TE significantly more than both students and classroom aspects. These results indicate that immersive self-viewing tends to anchor perceptual attention in students and classroom events, while concentrating interpretive effort on the teacher educator’s own actions and role.

The cluster analysis of normalized noticing frequencies across seven variables (attending and interpreting students, TE, classroom, plus VR experience) yielded three tentative profiles. One small cluster showed a classroom-centred pattern with high attending and interpreting of classroom aspects and limited attention to the TE and VR. A larger cluster combined strong interpreting of the TE with high attending to students but relatively low interpreting of the classroom, suggesting a profile that privileges sense-making about the teacher and individual learners. A third cluster was characterized by the highest levels of attending to the classroom along with elevated interpreting of the TE and moderate VR-related comments, pointing to a classroom-anchored profile that still invests substantial interpretive work in the TE. These differentiated quantitative profiles suggest that 360° VR-supported self-viewing can surface stable patterns in how experienced TEs allocate their attention and interpretive resources across students, themselves, and the classroom, with implications for designing targeted professional learning in immersive environments.

The findings highlight how immersive 360° VR analytics can be used to diagnose TEs’ characteristic noticing patterns and to design targeted professional learning that deliberately shifts the balance between attending and interpreting in classroom practice.

Keywords:

Teacher Educators, Virtual Reality, 360° recordings, Professional Noticing.