Reflecting with Standards - Novice Views on Teaching Practice

The purpose of this pilot study is to validate the effectiveness of embedding teaching standards in reflection prompts. Does this approach improve the quantity and depth of reflection commentary for novice pre-service teachers? What must be in place to ensure that novice teachers are effectively internalizing the teaching standards? These questions are paramount in the design of a webbased, electronic portfolio workspace for pre-service teachers. This pilot study analyzed the observations of 10 non-teachers who viewed and commented on three short video clips from the TIMSS study. Two approaches to presenting novices with teaching standards were explored, using the NCTM 1991 standards for “The Teachers’ Role in Discourse”. Evaluating the ideas expressed in the novice’s written observations, this study found that embedding teaching standards into reflection worksheets was far superior to simply providing the teaching standards as a standalone reference sheet. This study also showed that embedded scaffolding is critical to focusing the novice’s reflections and observations, as the positive gains vanish when the scaffolding is subsequently removed.