Learning to Teach from Anticipating Lessons through Comics-Based Approximations of Practice.

Abstract

Teaching is complex and relational work that involves teacher’s interactions with individual or multiple students around the subject matter. It has been argued that observation experiences (e.g. field placement or watching video clips) are not sufficient to help prospective teachers to develop knowledge of teaching. This study aims to identify, examine, and illustrate the ways in which comics-based representations of teaching facilitate prospective teachers’ learning to teach. Specifically, the author explored how the use of a technology supported lesson-sketching tool, Depict, enabled prospective secondary mathematics teachers to attend to mathematical interactions between teacher and students in instruction when anticipating the development of a lesson. Drawing resources from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the author examined the ways in which anticipations of classroom interaction about a planned lesson differ when the anticipation was done using the Depict tool as compared with talking through the written lesson plan. Using case study methodology, the study investigated the aspects of the teaching work prospective teachers attended to when engaged in depicting a lesson, and observed the ways in which prospective teachers employed the graphic resources to support their lesson depiction. The results reveal that prospective teachers using Depict tool to create comics-based lesson slideshows immersed themselves in classroom settings and demonstrated their capacity to incorporate detailed teacher instructional actions, student reactions and mathematical tasks in their lessons. The prospective teachers unpacked their planned discrete class activities and attended to the relational nature among teacher, students and mathematics in instruction. The study indicates that the anticipation of a lesson, through creation of comics-based lesson depiction, could be a learning opportunity that approximates the interactive nature of teaching practice. The study suggests that comics-based representations of teaching can be seen as semiotic resources that mediate prospective teachers’ generation of teacher-student moment-to-moment class interactions, and facilitate their attention to instructional issues they have not previously been aware of. The study also implies that in order to engage prospective teachers in learning to do the work of teaching, teacher educators should consider directing prospective teachers’ attention to issues of temporality, multimodality and multivocality in instruction.