The Problem With Learning to Teach

Here is the uncomfortable thing about learning to teach: for the first few years of your career, your primary research subjects are children. Every class you misread, every transition you fumble, every moment you lose the room — those are learning experiences, and the students in the room pay part of the cost.

This is not a new problem, and nobody is pretending it has a clean solution. But it raises a question that teacher education programmes have been grappling with for a long time: how much of the relevant learning can happen before the student teacher is standing alone in front of thirty eleven-year-olds?

One answer — not the only one, but a defensible one — is: more of it, if you give people good video.

What ViLLA Is

ViLLA (Videos in der Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerausbildung — Videos in Teacher Education) is an online portal of real classroom recordings built for use in teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea was to film actual teaching, make the recordings searchable and pedagogically annotated, and give student teachers access to genuine classroom situations before they were responsible for managing one themselves.

This sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Filming real classrooms requires ethical clearance, consent from pupils and parents, cooperation from schools, and a recording setup that doesn’t turn the lesson into a performance. The resulting videos need to be usable for instruction, which means they need accompanying material: lesson plans, worksheets, transcripts, annotations by subject-matter specialists. And then they need to be housed somewhere students can actually find them.

The first phase of ViLLA ran from April 2013 to December 2014, funded by the University of Cologne’s Innovation in Teaching programme. We opened officially on 5 November 2014 with a database of classroom sequences tagged by subject, year group, school type, and didactic focus. The core intended audience: student teachers, Referendarinnen* (trainee teachers in the practical training phase), and the university instructors and school-based mentors working with them.

What the Research Showed

The project was not just infrastructure. From the beginning we ran research alongside the portal development — specifically, quasi-experimental studies on whether and how video-based instruction actually improves the skills we care about.

The target construct was situation-specific skills for classroom management — the ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to classroom events in real time. This is a domain where there is reasonable theoretical agreement that expert teachers differ from novices not primarily in declarative knowledge (knowing that you should address disruptions early) but in perception and response speed (actually noticing the early signs and acting on them).

The key finding from the ViLLA studies: combining video with transcripts was more effective than control seminars that used neither. Students who worked with video and transcript material showed better development of situation-specific classroom management skills than comparison groups. The effect was not enormous, but it was there, it replicated, and it was large enough to justify the infrastructure investment.

The transcript component is worth highlighting because it’s not obvious. You might expect that video alone would be sufficient — you are showing people real teaching. But the transcript creates an additional layer of perceptual access: you can pause on a moment, read back exactly what was said, annotate, compare your reading of the situation with a peer’s. The multimodal combination seems to do something that either medium alone does not.

ViLLA 2.0: Scaling Up

By 2015, ViLLA had grown into a second development phase. In November 2016 it received federal funding through the BMBF’s Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung (Quality Initiative for Teacher Education), embedded in the University of Cologne’s Zukunftsstrategie Lehrerinnenbildung* (ZuS) umbrella project.

The scale change was significant. 185 videos in the database by the time of the 2019 presentation, covering more subjects, more school types, and more outside-school teaching and learning scenarios than the original portal had included. The self-learning modules — originally an add-on — became a central feature.

Two types of modules emerged from the practice:

Case-based modules built around a specific filmed sequence, asking the learner to work through what they observe, what decisions the teacher made, and what they would do differently. These are close to case-based reasoning as used in medical education — the video is the case.

Theme-centred modules organised around a pedagogical concept (classroom transitions, group work monitoring, handling disruptions) and drawing on multiple video examples to illustrate the same phenomenon across different contexts. The goal is pattern recognition — not learning what to do in this lesson, but developing a schema that transfers to next year’s class in a different school.

The Meta-Portal and What It Means

One development I am particularly interested in from a research infrastructure perspective: ViLLA’s integration into unterrichtsvideos.net, a meta-portal that aggregates classroom video collections from universities across Germany.

The single-portal model has an obvious limitation: your institution’s videos reflect your institution’s context. The schools you filmed, the subject specialists on your team, the pedagogical questions your programme emphasises. Aggregation across portals means a student teacher in Cologne can access video collected at Münster or Berlin, search across the combined database by year group and subject, and get access without separate registration at each institution.

This matters for research too. A shared infrastructure with standardised tagging creates the conditions for cross-institutional studies. You can ask whether the same video material works differently in different programme contexts, or whether different annotation frameworks lead to different learning outcomes. The portal is also, then, a methodology — a way of generating comparable data.

What I Think Is Actually Interesting Here

I should be honest about where my personal research interest sits in all of this, because it is not primarily in the technology.

The thing that I find genuinely interesting about the ViLLA project is the implicit theory of professional learning it rests on. We filmed real lessons — not idealised demonstrations, not training videos produced for the purpose, but actual classroom teaching with the roughness and contingency that implies. We then gave those videos to student teachers and asked them to look carefully.

The assumption is that professional perception can be educated. That what distinguishes a competent teacher from a novice is not just accumulated experience but the capacity to read situations quickly and accurately — and that this capacity can be developed through structured encounter with material before you are responsible for it.

This is an empirical claim and we have evidence for it. But it also connects to broader questions about expertise, perception, and what it means to prepare someone for a practice-based profession. Medical education has been working on these questions through simulation and case-based learning for decades. Teacher education is, in many institutions, still catching up.

ViLLA is one attempt to close that gap. Whether it is the right attempt, in its current form, is something I am still working out. But the question it is trying to answer — what do you need to have seen, and thought about, before you can teach well — seems to me like one of the important ones.

Where This Is Going

Two strands that were live at the time of the 2019 presentation and that I will return to in later posts:

The ProvidiS project (Förderung der professionellen Wahrnehmung in digitalen, videobasierten Selbstlernmodulen — Promoting Professional Perception in Digital, Video-Based Self-Learning Modules), a follow-on BMBF project in cooperation with the Universities of Münster and FU Berlin, which moves from infrastructure to targeted intervention design. The question shifts from “does video work?” to “which features of video-based learning design produce which effects on professional perception, for which learners?”

And a methodological strand I have become increasingly interested in: the videography setting itself as a research question. How you film a lesson — camera placement, editing conventions, what gets cut — shapes what the viewer can perceive. The transcript does something similar. These are not neutral mediations. They are constructions, and the choices made in constructing them have downstream effects on what student teachers learn to see. This connects to questions I have been thinking about in qualitative methodology more broadly — which I will probably end up writing about separately.

References

König, J., Blömeke, S., Klein, P., Suhl, U., Busse, A., & Kaiser, G. (2014). Is teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge a premise for noticing and interpreting classroom situations? Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 76–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.11.004

Kramer, C., König, J., Strauß, S., & Kaspar, K. (2020). Classroom videos or transcripts? A quasi-experimental study to assess the effects of media-based learning on pre-service teachers’ situation-specific skills of classroom management. International Journal of Educational Research, 103, 101624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101624

Sherin, M. G. (2007). The development of teachers’ professional vision in video clubs. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron, & S. J. Derry (Eds.), Video Research in the Learning Sciences (pp. 383–395). Lawrence Erlbaum.

van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers' interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–596.