Classroom teachers need to monitor a group of students varying in interest, knowledge, and behavior at the same time that they present a lesson and adapt it on the fly to student questions and understanding. Many areas of expertise are associated with special kinds of perceptual skills, and teaching presents its own perceptual challenges. We discuss the special nature of the expert looking that teachers must develop and how it relates to more general models of expertise. Standard methods of classroom video are limited in their support of teacher professional looking, and we explore an alternative using mobile eyetracking that overcomes many of these limits. The combination of mobile eyetracking records and standard video enables the participant to “re-experience” a situation in a vivid way, while also seeing things they missed the first time through.
We report a study in which pairs of novice and experienced teachers teaching the same students watched their own mobile eyetracking recordings while performing a retrospective think-aloud task.
Experienced teachers were better able to describe high-level features and their significance in the lessons, while novices were more likely to talk about in-the-moment events such as things they failed to see while teaching. This is consistent with work on expertise that suggests there are both costs and benefits to expert looking.
Our results suggest that the ability to quickly grasp the meaning of a classroom situation may be associated with less awareness of some of the lower-level features on which those inferences are based. Novice and experienced teachers notice different things and have different perspectives on classroom processes; understanding the cognitive process of teachers will require combining insights from each. The methods used in this study are quickly becoming less costly and more accessible, and they have a unique role to play in research and in teacher professional development.