Impact of Critical Events in an Animated Classroom Story on Teacher Learners’ Online Comments

We examined the effect of reference to critical events in an animated classroom story on the quality of teachers’ comments in an online learning experience. We analyzed data using systemic functional linguistics and logistic regression. We found statistically significant evidence that participants made more reflective and evaluative comments and proposed more alternative teaching moves when they referenced critical events than when they did not. The study contributes to validating a theoretical distinction between reference point and reference object in the literature on video assisted, online teacher education: While attached reference objects help learners be more focused and productive, those qualities differ depending on reference points included in those reference objects. This study also provides preliminary evidence to support the practice of selecting clips that deviate from instructional norms when designing video-based professional learning opportunities. Introduction This paper examines the impact of critical events in an animated classroom episode in geometry, which we take as an example of reference points (Wise, Padmanabhan, & Duffy, 2009), on the nature of teacher learners’ comments within an online learning experience. This online experience revolved around animated representations of instruction in which cartoon characters were used to represent the teacher and students (Herbst, Chazan, Chen, Chieu, & Weiss, 2011). By critical event, we mean a moment of the episode in which instructional norms (Herbst & Chazan, 2003) are breached. For example, in a geometry lesson when the teacher presents a problem for which students are to produce a proof, but without providing statements that clearly identify the ‘givens’ 1 The work reported in this paper was done with the support of NSF grants ESI-0353285 and DRL0918425 to Patricio Herbst. Opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.