Laura R. Van Zoest

• PhD
• Professor at Western Michigan University

Research on teachers’ noticing of student mathematical thinking has typically focused on how a teacher attends to, interprets, and determines a response to an individual student contribution in isolation from the broader mathematical classroom context. This research focus is not nuanced enough, however, to fully account for the complex noticing req...

Better understanding preservice teachers' current perceptions toward students with disabilities will allow mathematics educators to create specific strategies for helping students to develop perceptions promoting inclusive classroom environments. To access these perceptions, we developed an online survey that asks respondents about their knowledge...

This symposium addresses the ways mathematics education can acknowledge the influence of constructed ideas of equity, normalcy, intelligence, interventions, science, and excellence that lead to differential access to power on the organization of learning. We bring together scholars in mathematics education across the world to critique systems of op...

Background on Rehearsals ● Call for learning experiences (in both methods courses and professional development) that support teachers’ development of knowledge for teaching in conjunction with capabilities to enact core teaching practices (Grossman et al., 2009) ● Effective teacher preparation programs incorporate practice-based experiences that...

Educational research has spent over a century developing theories, research strategies, and methodological approaches that center whiteness and name it “standard” or “traditional”. Despite major contributions from diverse scholars over the last several decades offering new ways of designing and conducting ambitious and inclusive research, a great d...

Teachers can more productively use board work to scaffold joint sense making.

Negative perceptions held by teachers toward students with disabilities create environments that make students feel uncomfortable and often incapable of participating actively in classrooms. Much of the research about these perceptions is focused on teachers of students with learning disabilities, which leaves out teachers' perceptions toward stude...

Despite many laws requiring inclusive education for students with disabilities, the reality is that although students with disabilities have been allowed to be in the classroom, in many cases they have not been fully included in the activities of the community. One reason for this exclusion may be the perceptions of disability held by the classroom...

Learn why collecting, clarifying, and revoicing—often great teaching moves—do not always work.

Concerns about the disconnect between what goes on in teacher preparation programs and school classrooms have led to a greater emphasis on opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in the practice of teaching during their teacher education programs. Pedagogies of enactment have been shown to provide opportunities for preservice teachers to en...

Do your students ever share ideas that are only peripherally related to the discussion you are having? We discuss ways to minimize and deal with such contributions.

To better understand the critical early years of teaching and teacher identity development, this study explored the mathematics teacher identity of two early career middle school mathematics teachers and the influence of their working communities on its development. Emel and Berk graduated from the same reform-oriented teacher education program and...

We look at the multiple layers of mathematics teacher educator (MTE) learning generated when a mathematics teacher educator prepared to teach a course on learning to teach mathematics by engaging in Artifact-Enhanced Collegial Inquiry (ACI) with a colleague experienced in teaching the course. We describe ACI and use the contexts of this particular...

We argue that progress in the area of research on mathematics teacher responses to student thinking could be enhanced were the field to attend more explicitly to important facets of those responses, as well as to related units of analysis. We describe the Teacher Response Coding scheme (TRC) to illustrate how such attention might play out, and then...

Teacher responses to student mathematical thinking (SMT) matter because the way in which teachers respond affects student learning. Although studies have provided important insights into the nature of teacher responses, little is known about the extent to which these responses take into account the potential of the instance of SMT to support learni...

Using student mathematical thinking during instruction is valued by the mathematics education community, yet practices surrounding such use remain difficult for teachers to enact well, particularly in the moment during whole-class instruction. Teachers’ orientations—their beliefs, values, and preferences—influence their actions, so one important as...

Ambiguity is a natural part of communication in a mathematics classroom. In this paper, a particular subset of ambiguity is characterized as clarifiable. Clarifiable ambiguity in classroom mathematics discourse is common, frequently goes unaddressed, and unnecessarily hinders in-the-moment communication because it likely could be made more clear in...

We apply Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice ideas to the process of incorporating new researchers into an ongoing mathematics education research project. We illustrate this application by describing how the Leveraging MOSTs research project coding team can be viewed as a community of practice. We describe how we have used this particular commu...

In this chapter, we argue that there are two critical aspects of noticing student mathematical thinking: noticing within an instance of student thinking and noticing among instances of student thinking. We use the noticing literature to illustrate these distinctions. We then discuss how the MOST Analytic Framework analysis provides structure and gu...

This study investigated attributes of 278 instances of student mathematical thinking during whole-class interactions that were identified as having high potential, if made the object of discussion, to foster learners’ understanding of important mathematical ideas. Attributes included the form of the thinking (e.g., question vs. declarative statemen...

Recent advances in technology have resulted in an array of new digital tools for capturing classroom video, making it much easier for teachers to collect video from their own classrooms and share it with colleagues, both near and far. We view teacher self-captured video as a promising tool for improving mathematics teacher education. In this articl...

The mathematics education community values using student thinking to develop mathematical concepts, but the nuances of this practice are not clearly understood. We conceptualize an important group of instances in classroom lessons that occur at the intersection of student thinking, significant mathematics, and pedagogical opportunities-what we call...

Identify student thinking that has potential to support significant mathematical discussion and pedagogical opportunity.

Scholars have debated which teacher characteristics are primary in determining teachers’ practice. Some claim that identity is at the core of teachers’ ways of being and acting; others argue that teachers’ actions depend principally on their knowledge or beliefs. We argue that, whichever is examined, it is important to study how teachers use specif...

We draw on research into the durability of sociomathematical and professional norms to make a case for attending to productive norms in teacher education experiences. We illustrate that productive norms have the potential to support teacher learning by (a) improving teachers' own mathematical understanding, particularly of specialized content knowl...

Although skilled mathematics teachers and teacher educators often “know” when interruptions in the flow of a lesson provide an opportunity to modify instruction to improve students’ mathematical understanding, others, particularly novice teachers, often fail to recognize or act on such moments. These pivotal teaching moments (PTMs), however, are ke...

This study investigated the extent to which three sociomathematical and four professional norms intentionally fostered in an early mathematics pedagogy course through the use of a video-case curriculum re-emerged in a similar context with two groups: (1) teacher candidates in the final mathematics pedagogy course of the same teacher education progr...

Teachers often have students publicly share their mathematical thinking as part of classroom instruction. Before reading further, we invite you to stop and think about this practice by writing down your responses to the following two questions:

Although having students make their mathematical thinking public has become a commonly encouraged practice in U.S. schools, little is known about how teachers perceive this practice. This study examined 14 beginning mathematics students' thoughts about making student thinking public using a framework for assessing the extent to which a practice sup...

This study investigates the role of synergistic scaffolds in supporting preservice teachers’ knowledge of self-as-teacher. Data include preservice teacher papers written before and after the introduction of scaffolds, surveys, and interviews. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze differences in the quality of the papers, the rel...

This study investigated changes in 22 secondary school mathematics teachers' self-perceived and observed teaching practices during their involvement in a three-year professional development program. Data were collected over four years and analyzed for changes over time. Sources included a survey given at the beginning and end of the program that ad...

The United States has engaged in intensive reform efforts in school mathematics education in the decade since the publication of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematicsâ–™ Standards for School Mathematics. This context has generated interest in how to best develop reformâ–“oriented teachers. In this article the authors describe their thinki...

The United States has engaged in intensive reform efforts in school mathematics education in the decade since the publication of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Standards for School Mathematics. This context has generated interest in how to best develop reform–oriented teachers. In this article the authors describe their thinking t...

This report describes a case study of asecondary school mathematics internship wheremost of the elements of the internship ecologywere aligned with calls by the National Councilof Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM] for reform.Much research has been done on the lack ofimpact of teacher education programs on teacherclassroom behavior. Often this results...

Discourse is one area of the nctm's professional teaching standards for School Mathematics (1991) that causes many teachers particular difficulty. Mathematics teachers have a long history as lecturers. Although “initiation-reply-evaluation” (Richards 1991) sequences between the teacher and students are not uncommon, genuine mathematical conversatio...

One curriculum change proposed by the NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (1989, 109) is an increased focus on probability in the middle grades.

This research extended the validation of a framework for assessing and describing children's thinking in multidigit number situations and used this framework to generate and evaluate different versions of an instructional program. The key constructs of the framework--counting, partitioning, grouping, and number relationships--appeared to be highly...

This research extended the validation of a framework for assessing and describing children's thinking in multidigit number situations and used this framework to generate and evaluate different versions of an instructional program. The key constructs of the framework—counting, partitioning, grouping, and number relationships—appeared to be highly st...

The study compared beliefs about mathematics teaching of four pre-service elementary teachers involved in an intervention experience with those of their non-involved peers. During this intervention, which was based on a socio-constructivist approach to mathematics instruction, the intervention group participated in regular, small-group teaching exp...