Effects of Camera Placement on Undergraduates’ Peer Teaching Reflection

Abstract

We investigated whether camera placement affects peer teachers’ focus of attention during reflection. Preservice music teachers (N = 14) reflected on peer teaching videos that had been recorded simultaneously from a head-mounted camera and a tripod-mounted camera at the back of the classroom. Participants completed the teaching reflection cycle twice, providing their observation comments in response to open-ended prompts. Responses were coded, with a single sentence as the unit of analysis, and a three-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant difference in comment frequencies according to comment type (student-focused or teacher-focused) but not according to camera placement or trial. Our results corroborate previous research indicating that undergraduate peer teachers focus more on themselves than on their peers, and suggest that placing the camera in a position that shows the students, rather than the teacher, does not seem to affect this tendency. We discuss the implications for peer teaching experiences in teacher education courses.