Straight from the teacher’s mouth: the value of own-perspective gaze-elicited think-aloud for understanding culture-specific teacher expertise

Abstract

The pervasive influence of culture in human society is well-documented in experimental settings and in early years. However, less is known regarding cultural differences during classroom instruction, especially at the process-level: yet, classroom experiences are fundamentally cultural and dynamic in nature. Therefore, this paper examined patterns of teacher cognition across two country settings. To do this, forty teachers from two countries, UK (10 experts, 10 novices) and Hong Kong (10 experts, 10 novices), were eye-tracked during naturally-occurring teacher-centred classroom instruction. We then used participating teachers’ own gaze replays elicited teachers’ own commentaries on their cognition as occurred during the eye-tracked classroom instruction. These commentaries formed the data that we thematically analysed. We computed talk proportions from these and subjected them to multivariate Dirichlet regression analyses. We found cultural differences to emerge comprehensively across the teacher cognitions investigated—perceptions, thematic focus, timescales, holistic processing, classroom relationships. Culture interacted with expertise to predict teacher cognitions across four out of five overarching categories considered within this paper. Implications for teacher development are discussed, including the importance of sensitivity to the cultural context when considering teacher effectiveness.

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ORCID for Nora McIntyre: orcid.org/0000-0003-4626-3298

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