Abstract:

Professional Vision (Schäfer & Seidel, 2015) is an articulated and fundamental component in the teacher’s professionalism: it appears difficult to gain even for the experienced teachers, as the experience of situations is not enough to activate a skill that is reflexive and observative at the same time. It requires a retracement of one’s practices and a work of acknowledgment and of clarification of their innate meanings and goals, which often needs an accompaniment performed by an expert in research-training contexts.

Therefore it seems important to start the future teachers, within the Degrees enabling them to the teaching professions, to develop some professional vision skills to detect meaningful situations in the complexity of the class: these are not always realized at the surface level of the didactic activity, but are at the implicit ones level, into deep, and making them emerge requires complex observation skills, which can be gained in the long run (Santagata & Yeh, 2016).
In the pre-service educational training, professional vision can become a marker of the fact that students are progressively structuring conceptual knowledge on teaching and on learning, as such a skill is informed of the deep and reflexive knowledge of the didactic process. One of the strongest mediators for this goal is the video verité. The analysis of fragments of videos recording authentic school sessions, in fact, not only supports gaining the necessary knowledge to decodify didactic situations, linking theory to practice, but also to stimulate reflection on practice and make both its implicit and explicit meanings emerge (Stürmer et alii, 2016).

In this contribution a workshop path will be illustrated, performed with the students enrolled in the first academic year of Primary Education Sciences, in which an interface device between practical experience and theoretical analysis is tested, with the video at the centre.

The aim is to guarantee pre-service trainee students some experiences that would enable both their plunging in the teaching-learning process and the simulation and preview of possible scenarios starting from real experiences, from their first year at University.

The methodology used is just the Cognitive Apprenticeship one, which according to Collins and his colleagues (1991) foresees a first step of modelling, activated by expert teachers acting as tutors, then a scaffolding action by the same tutors on the direct observations of the students and finally the Professor’s coaching, to give both restorative and generative feedbacks (Laici & Pentucci, 2019).

The final task is the one of let the students experiment noticing, that is the teacher’s skill of paying attention in an intentional way to the events that inside the class directly influence learning and reasoning, that is the process activated to give sense to what has been noticed, linking the observed situations to the teaching/learning knowledge (Stürmer & Seidel, 2015).

Keywords:

Professional vision, video analysis, pre-service teacher training, apprenticeship.