Conference Agenda

The symposium is interested in the empirically observable tensions between the interaction order (Goffman 1983) necessary for the accomplishment of teaching practice and demanding subject-related tasks that potentially challenge an established order. Although the classroom interaction order is aligned with the organisational purpose of enabling (subject-related) learning, it also seems to function independently and even potentially in tension with challenging tasks: “it has a life on its own and makes demands on its own behalf” (Vanderstraeten 2001, p. 273). This tension is also noticeable if we look at teaching and learning practices from different research traditions and perspectives. Looking at a classroom from the perspective of the classroom order or either with a viewpoint of the generic quality of instruction (e.g., Praetorius et al. 2018), one may assess a particular lesson as efficient and well-managed. In contrast, the same lesson might appear profoundly deficient and inefficient from a didactical, content-based point of view (Breidenstein & Tyagunova 2020; Schlesinger et al. 2018). Findings from research on classroom management show that demanding and challenging tasks also pose greater difficulties for classroom management: “In response to these threats to order, teachers often simplify task demands or lower the risk for mistakes” (Doyle 2006, p. 111). Practices of classroom management and practices of learning operate thus in different logics and may be in tension with each other.

In order to make these tensions empirically visible within the symposium, a selected lesson recorded on video will be analysed using different analytical and methodological approaches. Video studies have become an important resource for the analysis of teaching processes and practices in recent years. This is reflected in the large number of international video studies within Europe (e.g., Klette et al. 2022) and beyond (e.g., Opfer 2022) that focus on more or less subject-specific aspects of teaching. Accordingly, there is a certain consensus in classroom research that the observation of instructional interactions requires direct analysis of teaching processes themselves (Opfer 2022). Video studies, therefore, seem particularly suitable for considering both the perspective of the teachers and that of the students, as well as the interactive interconnectedness of teaching and learning practices and the involvement of material things. Based on these assumptions, we will look at the relationship between teachers' “instruction practices” (Klette et al. 2022) and students' learning practices, addressing the following questions:

- What subject-specific processes and practices can be identified based on video observations of classroom interaction?

- Which phenomena of classroom order and which aspects of subject-related teaching and learning processes become visible with the help of particular analytical and methodological approaches and which are ‘overlooked’ or not taken into account at all?

- How do different camera perspectives affect the analysis of interactive processes and interactions in the classroom?

The empirical video data for the joint analysis came from the Research Training Group 2731 Subject Specific Learning and Interaction in Elementary School (INTERFACH), granted 2022 by the German Research Foundation (DFG). A special feature of the study’s video data is that, in addition to the classic teacher and student camera, the data collection was expanded to the extent that individual pairs of students were additionally recorded with several action cams in the classroom. The material comes from a 3rd grade math lesson in Germany. The students work on ‘arithmetic triangles’ and are asked to identify a pattern in the triangles they have calculated at the end of the lesson The aim of the symposium will then be to compare the analyses of this joint video to find out if and how the different methodological approaches can lead to different and/or similar results.

In this presentation, the empirical video data will be analyzed with the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO) manual, a thoroughly validated protocol originally developed to observe key dimensions of effective language arts teaching (Grossman, Loeb, Cohen, & Wyckoff, 2013). The PLATO framework has been used across subjects and countries, often to say something about the overall quality of the instruction or to dig deeper into specific aspects of instruction (Cohen, 2018; Klette & Blikstad-Balas, 2018; Magnusson, Roe, & Blikstad‐Balas, 2019; Stovner & Klette, 2022). PLATO consists of 12 different elements (for example “purpose”, “classroom discourse”, “feedback” and “intellectual challenge”), and each of these is scored every 15 minutes by a certified coder on a scale from 1-4. For this presentation, the video provided for joint analyses will be analyzed through PLATO. We will first provide an overview of the total picture provided by PLATO by looking at all the elements, before going into a few selected elements that highlight particular aspects of the video. The phenomena and classroom practices that “stand out” by applying PLATO will be discussed. As all observation systems highlights some features at the expense of others (Bell, Dobbelaer, Klette, & Visscher, 2019; White, Luoto, Klette, & Blikstad-Balas, 2022), we will attempt to make any tensions between what is empirically visible in the video, and what is captured and measured by the manual, a starting point for further discussion. In particular, we will pay attention to the explicit teaching practices favored by PLATO, and the degree to which student perspectives are taken into account in the scoring. We will provide examples from the PLATO scoring where students are clearly taken into account, for example when measuring their opportunities to talk in the measurement of the “classroom discourse” element, and instances where it is more challenging to establish that student voices are a part of the assessment.

Bell, C. A., Dobbelaer, M. J., Klette, K., & Visscher, A. (2019). Qualities of classroom observation systems. School effectiveness and school improvement, 30(1), 3-29. Cohen, J. (2018). Practices that cross disciplines?: Revisiting explicit instruction in elementary mathematics and English language arts. Teaching and Teacher Education. Grossman, P., Loeb, S., Cohen, J., & Wyckoff, J. (2013). Measure for measure: The relationship between measures of instructional practice in middle school English language arts and teachers’ value-added scores. American Journal of Education, 119(3), 445-470. Klette, K., & Blikstad-Balas, M. (2018). Observation manuals as lenses to classroom teaching: Pitfalls and possibilities. European Educational Research Journal, 17(1), 129-146. Magnusson, C. G., Roe, A., & Blikstad‐Balas, M. (2019). To what extent and how are reading comprehension strategies part of language arts instruction? A study of lower secondary classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(2), 187-212. Stovner, R. B., & Klette, K. (2022). Teacher feedback on procedural skills, conceptual understanding, and mathematical practices: A video study in lower secondary mathematics classrooms. Teaching and Teacher Education, 110, 103593. White, M., Luoto, J., Klette, K., & Blikstad-Balas, M. (2022). Bringing the conceptualization and measurement of teaching into alignment. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 75, 101204.

This contribution will rely upon the Joint Action framework in Didactics (JAD) to characterize continuities and discontinuities in the process of construction of a shared reference in classroom transactions (Schubauer-Leoni et al, 2007; Ligozat et al, 2018; Marty et al, in press). Initially built as a tool for describing and understanding teaching and learning practices in different subjects and/or different contexts (Sensevy, 2011; Ligozat, 2023), the JAD framework combines an epistemological analysis of the contents at stake in the instructional tasks and a situated analysis of the meaning-making process generated in the enactment of tasks by the teacher and the students. This latter analysis is supported by a couple of generic concepts featuring the situation encountered by the classroom participants. (1) The milieu consists of the material and symbolic environment that the teacher or students acts upon, use, talk about, interpret, etc. For a given environment (seen by the observer), the milieu may be different for the teacher and the students or between students; each one can use different elements or give different meaning to the same element. (2) The didactic contract features the interdependent actions of the teacher and the students in the classroom. These actions are based on a system of habits, norms, and expectations. Most of the components of this system are played implicitly in the classroom transactions, unless one of the participants does not act according to them (breach in the didactic contract), and hence make the rules, norms and expectations visible in the “response” of the others. The contract and its evolution are rooted in the regularities of students’ and teacher’s behaviors (that are the studied classroom events) and their evolutions (Brousseau, 1997). Through the data provided, the articulation of both the epistemological features of the task and the situated meaning-making process that takes place in solving the tasks will be performed. Since didactic joint actions are not common actions, but interdependent lines of actions between the teacher and the students, it is possible to consider different participants’ perspectives in the process of building a shared reference. This allows to discuss certain criteria of teaching quality, such as the opportunities given to the students in participating to the knowledge content development and the consistency of the shared reference built, with respect to the expected learning outcomes of tasks.

Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics. Didactique Des Mathématiques, 1970-1990. Kluwer Academic Publ. Ligozat, F. (2023). Comparative Didactics. A Reconstructive Move from Subject Didactics in French-speaking Educational research. In F. Ligozat, K. Klette, & J. Almqvist (Éds.), Didactics in a Changing World. European Perspective on Teaching, Learning and the Curriculum. (p. 35 54). Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/9783031208096 Ligozat, F., Lundqvist, E., & Amade-Escot, C. (2018). Analysing the continuity of teaching and learning in classroom actions : When the joint action framework in didactics meets the pragmatist approach to classroom discourses. European Educational Research Journal, 17(1), 147 169. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904117701923 Schubauer-Leoni, M.-L., Leutenegger, F., Ligozat, F., & Flückiger, A. (2007). Un modèle de l’action conjointe professeur-élèves : Les phénomènes didactiques qu’il peut/doit traiter. In G. Sensevy & A. Mercier (Éds.), Agir ensemble. L’action conjointe du professeur et des élèves (p. 51 91). Presses universitaires de Rennes. Sensevy, G. (2011). Overcoming Fragmentation : Towards a Joint Action Theory in Didactics. In B. Hudson & M. A. Meyer (Éds.), Beyond Fragmentation : Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe (p. 60 76). Barbara Budrich Publishers.

In our contribution, we will look at the relationship between teachers’ instruction practices and students’ learning practices from two methodological perspectives: documentary method and ethnomethodology. The documentary method allows us to reconstruct individual and collective emergent phenomena as well as students’ subject-specific skills and knowledge (Martens & Asbrand 2022) in the classroom. While ethnomethodology examines local education orders and procedures of everyday organisation of classroom activities and instruction-in-interaction (Hester & Francis 2000). Most studies within these two methodological approaches have so far focused primarily on teachers’ instruction (for overview, see Gardner 2019), or solely on classroom public conversations. The question of how ‘learning’ – not in the sense of a product of certain procedures and classroom activities, but as a learning process – can be empirically observed has only become the subject of more detailed analysis in recent years (e.g., Eskildsen & Majlesi 2018; Hackbarth et al. 2022). From the perspectives of documentary method and ethnomethodology, ‘learning’ is not only to be conceived as a cognitive, individual-bound process, but as a socially constituted phenomenon – as a contingent and complex process of changes, constituted in interaction, imbued with pragmatic orientations, and accomplished with the help of various semiotic resources (linguistic, interactional, nonverbal, graphic, etc.). It can be analysed in terms of procedures of communicative representation of knowledge or conceptualizable as “learning moments” (Moutinho & Carlin 2021) or as an actionist practice of understanding and interpreting (Hackbarth et al. 2022), which is particularly evident in peer learning situations in the classroom. Drawing on these perspectives on the social emergence of learning and based on the concrete empirical video data from the symposium, we will focus on two questions. First, how are different instructional resources (specific didactical tools, material objects, verbal accounts, non-verbal actions etc.) used by the teacher to explicate a specific subject-related school knowledge and to facilitate its understanding by the students? Second, how do students’ representations of knowledge and understanding, or changes in understanding, correspond to characteristics of the learning environment and instructive activities of the teacher? This focus makes it possible to consider the tension between the teacher-intended or facilitated impulses or tasks in relation to the students’ processing of these, for example in cooperative student-student interactions. At the same time, this enables an empirical description of phenomena such as students’ understanding of a particular subject-matter learning content.

Eskildsen, S. W., & Majlesi, A. R. (2018). Learnables and teachables in second language talk: Advancing a social reconceptualization of central SLA tenets. Introduction to the special issue. The Modern Language Journal, 102, 3–10. Gardner, R. (2019). Classroom interaction research: The state of the art. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 212–226. Hackbarth, A., Asbrand, B., & Martens, M. (2022). Learning as a Relationship Between Understanding and Interpretation. The Acquisition of Knowledge in Actionist Practices. In M. Martens, B. Asbrand, T. Buchborn, & J. Menthe (Hrsg.), Dokumentarische Unterrichtsforschung in den Fachdidaktiken: Theoretische Grundlagen und Forschungspraxis (S. 39-53). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Hester, S., & Francis, D. (eds.) (2000). Local education order: Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Moutinho, R., & Carlin, A. P. (2021). 'Learning Moments' as Inspectable Phenomena of Inquiry in a Second Language Classroom. Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 79(1), 80–103. Martens, M., & Asbrand, B. (2022). Documentary Classroom Research. Theory and Methodology. In M. Martens, B. Asbrand, T. Buchborn, & J. Menthe (Hrsg.), Dokumentarische Unterrichtsforschung in den Fachdidaktiken: Theoretische Grundlagen und Forschungspraxis (S. 19–38). Wiesbaden: Springer VS.