Teachers’ Professional Vision: Teachers’ Gaze During the Act of Teaching and After the Event

Abstract

To date most of our knowledge on professional vision has relied on verbal data or questionnaires that used classroom videos as prompts. This has been used to tell us about a teacher’s professional vision. Recently, however, new studies explore professional vision during the act of teaching through the use of mobile eye-tracking. This novel approach poses the question: how do these two “professional visions” differ? Visual attention represented by gaze was used as a proxy to studying professional vision (specifically its noticing component). To achieve this, eye-tracking as a data collection method was used. We worked with three teachers and employed eye-tracking glasses to record teacher eye movements during teaching (4 lessons per teacher; labelled as IN mode). After each lesson, we selected short clips from the lesson recorded by a static camera aimed at pupils and showed them to the same teacher (i.e., providing a similar setting as traditional studies on professional vision) while recording eye movements and gaze behavior data through a screen-based eye-tracker (labelled as ON mode). The two modes differ and due to these differences, comparison is difficult. However, by overlaying them and describing them in detail we want to highlight the exact variance observed. A comparison between IN vs ON condition in terms of dwell time on the same students in either condition was made using both quantitative (correlation) and qualitative (timeline comparison) methods. The findings suggest that the greatest differences in attention given to individual pupils occur when a pupil who was interacted with during the situation is missing from the view in the video recording. Even though individual differences are present in the patterns of gaze in IN and ON modes, the teachers in our sample consistently monitored more pupils more often in the ON mode than in the IN mode. On the other hand, the IN mode was mostly characterized by focused gaze on the pupil that the teacher interacted with in the moment with few side glances. The results aim to open a discussion about our understanding of professional vision in different contexts and about how current research may need to expand its outlook.

Pre-service and in-service teachers' professional vision depending on the video perspective—What teacher gaze and verbal reports can tell us

“…An important difference between eye-tracking data and verbal data is that eye-tracking captures both conscious and unconscious processes, while verbal data are limited to conscious, verbalizable processes (Godfroid et al, 2020). Visual data alone are therefore insufficient to draw conclusions about professional vision, but teacher's gaze can provide very valuable additional information (Minarikova et al, 2021).…”

“…This type of mixed-methods design is seen as promising for studying professional vision and gaining further insights into its nature and characteristics (Godfroid et al, 2020;Wyss et al, 2020). Corresponding studies are, however, still rare (Minarikova et al, 2021), and it remains largely unclear to what extent the gaze behavior is reflected in verbal statements.…”

Applying Eye-Tracking Technology in the Field of Entrepreneurship Education

“…This is particularly true when the entrepreneurial spirit refers 'a competence that is developed by each person who perseveres in fulfilling their motives, relinquishing stability to further develop themselves, others and their environment with passion, risk and sacrifice... (with) the desire to understand their (own) motivations... (and) seek and generate new opportunities to fulfil their motives, relying on their strong drive for achievement' (Arruti & Castro, 2021, p. 4). As eye tracking is based on the eye-mind hypothesis, or what is attended to by the eye is processed by the mind (Duchowski, 2007) which must be accompanied with stimulate recall to offer a fuller perspective on what we understand as professional vision, it is therefore important to cross-reference the selective attention-based on eye -tracking evident professional visionand knowledge-based reasoning, based on verbal data or questionnaires (Minarikova et al, 2021). This allows students to both see and hear from the expert's processing in encountered problems, where both 'attention based on their reasoning, and reason about things they give attention to' (Sherin et al, 2011, p. 5) can both be observed either by the students or teachers looking to teach it.…”

On the Language of Student Teachers’ Professional Vision: How Do Pre-Service EFL Teachers Comment on Classroom Videos of Pupil Engagement?

“…Professional vision has thus been mostly studied through verbal data (what teachers say they see) as accessing what they actually notice is more difficult to capture (the use of eye-tracking seems a promising avenue of research; cf. Minarikova et al, 2021). It is thus essential to understand the language that teachers use to verbalize their professional vision.…”

“…Professional vision is closely connected to verbal accounts of what is noticed (Minarikova et al, 2021), and the study of this phenomenon originates in linguistic anthropology. In teacher research, it has been mostly approached through verbal methods (questionnaires, interviews, reflective writing).…”