Framing Analysis Lite: A Tool for Teacher Educators

Abstract

A teachers' framing of their classroom interactions with students—their sense of “what’s going on here”—affects whether they attend and respond to the substance of students’ thinking, a central pillar of effective teaching in mathematics and science. Therefore, teacher educators would benefit from knowing how their pre-service teacher interns (aka student teachers) are framing their various classroom interactions. Unfortunately, detailed framing analysis typically relies on Interaction Analysis of video recordings. Teacher educators rarely have the access and time needed to collect and analyze such data. More commonly, teacher educators obtain pre-service teachers’ written reflections about their classroom interactions. We argue that a “lite” version of framing analysis allows teacher educators to infer at least a rough sense of how pre-service teachers are framing various classroom episodes, and this rough framing attribution is “instructionally actionable” in that it can inform the teacher educator’s next steps with pre-service teachers.