Promoting awareness of the characteristics of classrooms' complexity: A course curriculum in teacher education

This article presents a video and internet site based intervention designed to address the difficulties that the complex classroom environment poses for teachers, and then presents the study of its effectiveness as applied with 21 trainees in a university teacher education program. The intervention emphasized implicit cognitive processes as central to teaching-learning processes and the utilization of theoretical knowledge while making sense of the interrelations in complex situations. Trainees' pre- and post-intervention responses to a video-case analysis task underwent content analysis using six dimensions. Paired-samples t-tests were calculated. Following the intervention, the novices exhibited a shift toward a cognitive rather than behavioral perspective; an increased ability to identify and interpret implicit and explicit factors and interrelations, reflecting a higher awareness of complexity; and an enhanced capacity to link perceived teaching-learning processes to theoretical knowledge.