Emotions in classroom video evaluation—The interplay of student teachers’ joy and anger and the quality of classroom management in video clips

Abstract

In teacher education, classroom videos are frequently used to promote student teachers’ professional competence and initiate reflection. However, observing classroom videos triggers not only cognitive but also emotional processes, which are closely interconnected and may influence each other. Evaluating the presented teaching quality, therefore, might initiate emotions while these emotions, at the same time, might inform the evaluation. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the relationship between the presented teaching quality (represented by classroom management) of classroom videos and student teachers’ evaluation thereof.

In this correlational study, 617 student teachers observed pre-selected videos showing either effective or improvable classroom management as assessed by experts, stated their emotions (joy/anger) and, subsequently, evaluated classroom management quality using rating items. Repeated-measures ANOVA revealed that student teachers felt significantly more joy and less anger when observing effective as opposed to improvable classroom management, indicating that participants’ emotions can at least partially be ascribed to teaching quality differences between the clips. Additionally, regression analyses showed that joy correlated positively, anger negatively with student teachers’ subjective classroom management evaluation and explained for significant amounts of variance therein regarding different classroom management aspects (R²: 15 % - 64 %).

Findings underline the need for conscious usage of videos in teacher education and indicate that student teachers’ emotions during video observation should be considered in designing video-based learning environments as they enlarge the range of possibilities regarding how to integrate videos into teacher education courses.