Fit for your future career: training skills via video

In order to make it easier to get started in everyday teaching and to convey confidence in dealing with difficult or unclear teaching moments, the theoretical knowledge should ideally be practiced before starting the job. At RPTU, digital video sequences are used for this purpose, which can be paused or replayed at any time. Michael Jan Lars Kastor, a mathematics teacher training student at RPTU, describes a noticeable training effect: at the beginning, he had to watch the video sequences three to four times in order to be able to answer the associated analysis questions with confidence. Now, one viewing is enough: "My sense of confidence has increased significantly," he reports.

A video filmed from a bird's eye view shows a classroom scene in which four students are working on a problem in math class. A dynamic develops: one pupil drops out, another pursues an incorrect solution, and in the end there is disagreement. How should a teacher react in such a situation? When does it make sense to intervene and to what extent? Does the disengaging pupil need support or is he possibly underchallenged and bored?

If a prospective teacher is confronted with a scene like this, pure technical skills are only of limited help. What is needed are didactic skills that develop thanks to an interplay of subject-specific didactic theory and concrete teaching practice. In everyday teaching later on, the teacher must keep the focus on the lesson content at the same time as classifying such a teaching situation. The teacher must therefore be able to quickly grasp and assess a situation from a didactic perspective in order to be able to react in a solution-oriented and confident manner.

The aim: To make it easier to get started in everyday teaching

But how can such difficult or unclear teaching moments be trained in advance - before you actually stand in front of a class? RPTU mathematics didactics expert Professor Jürgen Roth asked himself this question. His idea: prospective teachers are confronted with authentic mathematical group work processes of learners and trained in their diagnostic and problem-solving skills through targeted tasks.

To enable students to analyze teaching situations from an observer's perspective, Roth decided to use digital video sequences that can be paused and replayed at any time. The diagnostic skills of the participating students are trained through analysis tasks tailored to the video sequences. This was the birth of the video tool ViviAn "Video vignettes for analyzing teaching processes". The aim is to diagnose various teaching scenes and to enable students to deal with them professionally even before their traineeship.

Intelligent training system

Initially, each vignette consisted of a single film sequence, a fixed list of questions and a stored sample solution - structured but rigid. Each vignette was a separate research project. This changed fundamentally when Marc Bastian Rieger joined the team. The postdoc, with a penchant for programming and a high demand for scientific quality, rebuilt the entire platform. He developed and programmed ViviAn entirely himself and is also responsible for the technical development of the homepage.

He also provides the AI that will be available in the future with tested expert knowledge. Marc Bastian Rieger trains it exclusively with scientifically validated content and data. External influences, for example from freely available models or the open Internet, are excluded. This ensures that the system works in a technically clean, didactically sound and scientifically controlled manner.

"The perceived safety increases"

The effectiveness of the training can now also be verified empirically: "We can prove that those who spend more time on the videos achieve better grades," says Rieger.

And there is also corresponding feedback from the student body: Michael Jan Lars Kastor, a mathematics teacher training student, describes a noticeable training effect. At the beginning, he had to watch the video sequences three to four times to be able to answer the analysis questions with confidence. Now, one viewing is enough. "My sense of confidence has increased significantly," he says, "I can now classify different teaching situations much more quickly and react appropriately." A sign that diagnostic skills can actually be trained.

"With ViviAn, we are filling a gap in the transition between theory and practice," says Roth. More than 60 course instructors are now working with ViviAn. At RPTU alone, around 500 students use the tool regularly. Demand is increasing: Lecturers from different departments across the DACH region ViviAn is already training their students' skills in this way. The so-called DACH region includes Germany (D), Austria (A) and Switzerland (CH). The two project owners Roth and Rieger see the high number of hits as an indicator of the need for practical diagnostic training and digitally supported skills acquisition.

ViviAn is also used in teacher training: Roth uses the system in workshops with teachers, who can use it to refresh their diagnostic skills and develop them using current examples.

Another area of application: training prospective psychotherapists

ViviAn has long since grown beyond the boundaries of mathematics didactics. In psychology, for example, ViviAn is used in the training of prospective psychotherapists: they analyze video vignettes in which fictitious patients simulate different therapeutic interview situations, which are then reflected upon professionally.

Further information: Training diagnostic skills with the help of ViviAn https://vivian.projects.rptu.de/