Using cases as triggers for teachers’ thinking about practice: A comparison of responses to animations and videos

Abstract

This study compared conversations among groups of teachers of high school geometry that had been triggered by either a video or an animation representation of instruction and managed with an open-ended agenda. All triggers represented scenarios that departed from what was hypothesized as normative. We used as dependent variable the proportion of modal statements about instructional practice made by a group, which we argue is a good quantitative indicator of the presence of tacit group knowledge about the norms of practice. Animations and videos produced similar proportion of modal statements, but that the types of modal statements differed—with animations being associated with more statements of probability and obligation and videos being associated with more statements of inclination.