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Teacher education programs can provide an important baseline for teachers to acquire expert-like knowledge structures, through the integration of theoretical knowledge and practice (Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, & Bransford, 2005). In particular,

identifying indicators of pre-service teachers’ knowledge application in authentic situations as well as assessing their integrated teacher knowledge is of great importance (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2009). One such indicator of pre-service teachers’

knowledge of effective teaching and learning is their Professional Vision. Since being originally described by Goodwin (1994), the notion of Professional Vision has been applied to the area of teaching and teacher education by several researchers (e.g. van Es & Sherin, 2002; Gamoran Sherin & van Es, 2008).

Goodwin (1994) referred to Professional Vision as

“socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interest of a particular social group.” (p. 606)

When characterizing Professional Vision, Goodwin described it as a cultural practice consisting of three key activities: highlighting, coding, and creating material

representations. Highlighting involves attending to particular professionally relevant aspects of a complex social activity in situ; coding pertains to the interpretation of what

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is highlighted, transforming it into categories that are relevant to the professional work. The use of material representations allows professionals to articulate their ways of seeing to others. In his paper, Goodwin gives examples of the Professional Vision of policemen as presented by the defense in the Rodney King trial, and that of

archaeologists at an excavation. In both cases, Professional Vision requires knowing what is salient to understanding the professional activity. In the case of the example of archaeology, Goodwin outlines how the practices of highlighting, coding and material representations are used to help apprentice archeologists develop an expert’s ability to see things on a site. Using this example, Goodwin explains that Professional Vision requires specialized knowledge to interpret and discuss a specific area of expertise. Goodwin uses the example of the Rodney King trial to show that a professional’s way of seeing is socially recognized as both different and better than that of a non-expert.

The concept of Professional Vision has also been studied in the context of education research, and especially in the area of teacher learning. Teachers’ Professional Vision is the ability to make sense of classroom interactions in meaningful ways (Sherin, 2001). The recognition that a classroom event is salient in itself requires significant

understanding of teaching and its goals, as does the interpretation and subsequent response.

To date, a large proportion of research in the area of Professional Vision in teacher education has been in the context of mathematics education. Many of these studies have looked at pre-service teacher’s ability to notice and reason about classroom activities, often while they are watching video footage of mathematical classroom practice. Noticing and reasoning are closely related to the ideas of highlighting and coding. van Es & Sherin (2002) described noticing as identifying what is important in a teaching situation. It also involves being able to make connections between specific

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events and broader principals of teaching and learning. Gamoran Sherin & van Es (2008) discussed that how a teacher reasons about events they notice is just as important as the act of noticing. Reasoning (sometimes called knowledge-based reasoning)

describes a pre-service teacher’s cognitive processing of classroom events, based on their knowledge of teaching (Stürmer, Könings, & Seidel, 2013; van Es & Sherin, 2002). Reasoning links the noticed situation to existing knowledge.

One common way in which pre-service teachers’ Professional Vision has been studied is through the use of video clubs. Sherin & van Es (2005) investigated the noticing patterns of a group of middle-school mathematics teachers as they participated in a video club. They found that it was possible to change what the teachers noticed, and how they interpreted what they noticed. Gamoran Sherin & van Es (2008) also found that Professional Vision is a productive lens for investigating how teachers learn through the use of video. It is widely agreed that being able to identify and make sense of classroom events is one of the most important aspects of teacher expertise (van Es & Sherin, 2008; Borko, Koellner, Jacobs, & Seago, 2011; Santagata, Zannoni, & Stigler, 2007).

2.4.1 Apprenticeship of Observation

One way that pre-service teachers develop their understanding of teaching is based on their prior experiences as a student. Learning about teaching, and learning how to teach requires pre-service teachers to think about teaching in unfamiliar ways. These are usually different to experiences they had as a student. Lortie (1975) described this as the problem of the “apprenticeship of observation”. Hammerness et al. (2005) explored the apprenticeship of observation in relation to helping pre-service teachers become

“adaptive experts”. They outline that:

“Prospective teachers come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world, and teaching, works. These preconceptions, developed in their

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“apprenticeships of observation,” condition what they learn. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for the purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom” (p. 366)

Therefore it is important that teacher educators take the pre-conceptions that PTs may have about teaching into account when working with PTs. Levin, Hammer, & Coffey (2009) claimed that attention to student thinking should serve as a goal for teacher education. However, they suggest that this is difficult, owing to PTs’ apprenticeship of observation:

“One major reason why novice teachers struggle to attend to student ideas and reasoning is their participation in the social and institutional systems of public schooling, which encourage framings of teaching in terms of classroom management and curricular coverage” (p. 152)

Levin et al. (2009) also suggested that a solution to the problem of the apprenticeship of observation is a greater focus on PTs paying attention to student thinking during their teacher education programmes.

Hammerness et al. (2005) explained that one positive of an apprenticeship of

observation is that students have a large amount of experience of being in a classroom, and several PTs do draw experience from excellent teachers who taught them. However, they point out that these experiences can result in “serious misconceptions about

teaching” (p. 367). Lortie (1975) explained that:

Students do not receive invitations to watch the teacher’s performance through the wings; they are not privy to the teacher’s private intentions and personal reflections on classroom events. Students rarely participate in selecting goals, making preparations or post-mortem analysis. Thus they are not pressed to place the teacher’s actions in a pedagogically oriented framework” (p. 62).

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PTs’ preconceptions and misconceptions about teaching are important factors to take into account as they negotiate the process of initial teacher education. However, these can be used in a positive way to further PTs’ understanding of teaching. Feiman- Nemser (2001) suggested that if teacher educators acknowledge that the beliefs pre- service teachers have about teaching act as filters for new learning, they can be given opportunities to “critically analyse their taken-for-granted often deeply entrenched beliefs so that these beliefs can be developed and amended” (p. 1017).