Development Of Proximal Formative Assessment Skills In Video-based Teacher Professional Development

Developing skills for proximal formative assessment is a primary goal of the academic-year professional development course offered by the Energy Project at SPU. We have adapted a video club model (Sherin & Han, 2004) in which groups of teachers watch and discuss video of classroom interactions. In this paper, we use a framework developed by Sherin & Han to analyze teacher reasoning about student understanding in an episode of video from our course. Teachers in the video use evidence from student interactions to propose general models of student thinking about energy. Our analysis suggests that the video-based professional development supports teachers in developing their professional vision for teaching: practicing the selective attention to and reasoning about evidence of student understanding that is required for proximal formative assessment.