A COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE ON TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL VISION: How teachers’ professional knowledge shapes a professional vision

Professional vision is a highly situation-specific skill in teachers that emphasizes their ability to selectively notice critical learning-relevant events and interpret them based on their professional knowledge. Recent professional vision research has highlighted the decisive role that selective attention processes play. Most researchers agree that experienced teachers notice—or see—critical events relevant to learning and teaching that remain hidden for laypeople. In this chapter, we first outline a cognitive perspective on teachers’ professional vision by highlighting how professional knowledge shapes selective noticing attention processes. We then focus on three central phases of knowledge acquisition and determine how they can be supported by learning with video excerpts during teacher education. The central phases that we outline are (a) the initial acquisition of conceptual professional knowledge, (b) the differentiation of knowledge schemata and pattern recognition, and (c) deliberate practice and case-based knowledge encapsulation.