Abstract:

The COVID1-19 has resulted in schools’ lockdown and caused students engagement challenges. Recent research regarding the effects of the second lockdown on the emotional wellbeing of learners at school, reveals that teachers tried various strategies to keep students engaged during remote learning. These strategies were grounded by teachers’ reports about “silent”, “passive”, “non-responsive” students. Teachers’ expertise to ensure learners’ engagement in the educational process plays a very important role which is demonstrated through variety of pedagogical strategies, which varied from individualised, personalised and differentiated learning models; application of e-tools and more interactive learning platforms to maintain regular contact with learners and engage them into meaningful projects, or simply trying to encourage and support students and keep their motivation [1].

The study focuses particularly on teachers’ abilities to notice crucial moments during teaching processes and to conduct adequate teaching activities, which support students’ motivation and learning. Research on noticing is based on Goodwin’s [2] definition of a professional vision, “which consists of socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group” (p. 606). In teaching practice, professional vision has been defined to include two components: selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning, which includes description, explanation, and prediction [3]. Therefore, the professional vision process includes integrated knowledge systems; its development is strongly guided by teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, and it is based on a large amount of deliberate practice [4]. The research question for this study is: how do teachers’ attention allocation between engaged and unengaged students differs between the face-to-face and online learning environments?

The pilot study is planned in two stages: pre-study (interviews with teachers) and an eye tracking case study. We present results of the first stage based on semi-structured interviews about definition and markers of student engagement in face-to-face and online learning settings with 7 teachers from teacher education department at a Lithuanian university. We anticipate differences in how teachers define and notice student engagement between the two learning environments, as well as how they attend to students (focusing more on unengaged students when face-to-face, while focusing more on engaged students when online).

References:
[1] Kaminskienė L., Galkienė A., Navaitienė J., Ignatova N., Kasperiūnienė J., Rutkienė A., Monkevičienė O., Miltenienė L., Melienė, R. (2021) The Power of The School Community in Increasing Inclusion, ICERI2021 Proceedings, pp. 9865-9873.
[2] Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. http://www.jstor.org/stable/682303
[3] Seidel T, Stürmer K. Modeling and Measuring the Structure of Professional Vision in Preservice Teachers. American Educational Research Journal. 2014;51(4):739-771. doi:10.3102/0002831214531321
[4] Wolff, C. E., Jarodzka, H., van den Bogert, N., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2016). Teacher vision: Expert and novice teachers’ perception of problematic classroom management scenes. Instructional Science, 44(3), 243–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9367-z

Keywords:

Engagement, professional vision, teachers' expertise.