Miriam Sherin

Northwestern University | NU · School of Education and Social Policy

Teachers' noticing of students' mathematical thinking plays an important role in supporting student learning. Yet little is known about how online professional development (PD)-a growing setting for PD in the USA-can cultivate this noticing. Here, we explore the potential of using two online tools for engaging video to support K-2 teachers' noticin...

The very act of creating videos of their own classrooms can help teachers improve their capacity to notice, even without group discussion (Sherin & Dyer, 2017a, 2017b). In this article, we describe how such learning occurred in a recent collaboration with 20 K-2 teachers in the midwestern United States who participated in a six-week standalone onli...

Noticing is a crucial part of any teachers’ classroom practices. Given its importance, research in teacher noticing has gained traction and has significantly increased in recent years. In this survey paper, we explore the terrains of research on teacher noticing in three areas: conceptualisations of teacher noticing, methodological approaches for s...

Video cameras have become smaller and increasingly embedded in our social lives. This study investigates the implications of these changes for teachers' work with video in professional development. Specifically, we focus on complexities and opportunities associated with teachers generating videos from their own classrooms, in the context of a short...

While recent research demonstrates that teacher noticing is a core construct of teaching, it also raises new questions about this construct. Here, we offer an expanded framework that addresses three key questions. Specifically, we suggest that attending involves not only selecting particular features of instruction to observe, but also disregarding...

Among mathematics teacher educators, a consensus has emerged that exemplary teaching involves attention to students’ thinking. This consensus stems, in part, from theoretical and empirical work highlighting the importance of teachers’ being able to make thoughtful in-the-moment decisions, building on students’ ideas to adjust the ongoing lesson. Si...

Recording moments of our lives on video is becoming more commonplace, and it is increasingly part of the professional work of teaching. Yet much remains to be learned about how teachers self-capture video from their own classrooms while teaching, which has important implications for teacher and student learning opportunities. This paper explores ho...

Language is key to how we understand and describe mathematics teaching and learning. Learning new terms can help us reflect on our practice and grow as teachers, yet may require us to be intentional about where and how we look for opportunities to expand our lexicons.

This article explores three processes involved in attending to evidence of students' thinking, one of the Mathematics Teaching Practices found in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. These processes, explored during a classroom activity on proportional relationships, are discussed in this article, another installment in the...

The articles in this volume reflect the continued popularity of video in professional development and raise important questions about how to situate video productively in varied contexts. Together, they highlight the complexity of expanding video-based professional development beyond designers and the challenges that designers and facilitators expe...

Numerous video-based programs have been developed to support mathematics teachers in reflecting on and examining classrooms interactions without the immediate demands of instruction. An important premise of such work is that teacher learning occurs at the time that the video is viewed and discussed with teachers. Recent advances in technology, howe...

Science education stakeholders worldwide are engaged in efforts to support teachers' noticing and making sense of students' thinking in science. Here we introduce the design of a science teaching video club and present a study of its implementation. The current design extends prior research on video clubs as a form of professional development for s...

This chapter explores the construct of teacher noticing and asks “What belongs in a theory of teacher noticing?” To begin, the chapter reviews recent conceptualizations of teaching noticing. The chapter then explores how contributions to this monograph push the boundaries of what constitutes teacher noticing and how it operates. In particular, the...

Videos are often used for demonstration and evaluation, but a more productive approach would be using video to support teachers’ ability to notice and interpret classroom interactions. That requires thinking carefully about the physical aspects of shooting video — where the camera is placed and how easily student interactions can be heard — as well...

Basing instruction on the substance of student thinking, or responsive teaching, is a critical strategy for supporting student learning. Previous research has documented responsive teaching by identifying observable teaching practices in a broad range of disciplines and classrooms. However, this research has not provided access to the teacher think...

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...

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...

A few years ago, a colleague shared a video from a first-year algebra class that he had observed. The video captured a class discussion about slopes of horizontal and vertical lines. At the beginning of the discussion, the teacher, Ms. Milner, asks, “How can we have a slope of zero?” Students respond in various ways; one student, Peter, explains th...

Research in science and mathematics education suggests that the pedagogical practice of responsive teaching—teaching that notices, attends and responds to the substance (not merely the correctness) of students' thinking—supports student engagement in disciplinary practices. However, researchers in science education and researchers in mathematics ed...

This chapter on multimedia learning with video focuses on what and how teachers learn from interacting socially with one another while viewing and analyzing videos of classrooms, an emphasis motivated by the emergence of popular practices that use video in the professional development of teachers and by the widespread assumption that video used in...

There is a general consensus among researchers and teacher educators that classroom video can be a valuable tool for pre-service teacher education. Media such as video are not, however, in themselves effective. They have to be embedded in an instructional program to be useful. Yet, little empirical research examines how specific instructional appro...

Understanding teacher cognition in the moments of instruction has become increasingly important to the mathematics education community over the past two decades. Various reforms and policies make it clear that to support student learning, instruction must be based, at least in part, on the ideas that students raise in class, the reasoning that ensu...

In this chapter we present a brief portrait of how researchers engaged in the study of mathematics teaching have understood teaching expertise, a portrait that is attentive to the diversity that has existed and continues to exist in the field. To do so we first adopt a historical perspective and attempt to capture some of the trends in how teaching...

This paper examines a group of secondary mathematics teachers who met 16 times to discuss video excerpts of their teaching. The explicit purpose of the meetings was to assist the teachers in preparing video for submission to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Analysis of meeting transcripts reveals that teachers engaged in inte...

Mathematics Teacher Noticing is the first book to examine research on the particular type of noticing done by teachers---how teachers pay attention to and make sense of what happens in the complexity of instructional situations. In the midst of all that is happening in a classroom, where do mathematics teachers look, what do they see, and what sens...

An important goal of mathematics education reform is to support teacher learning. Toward this end, researchers and teacher educators have investigated ways in which teachers learn about mathematical content, pedagogical strategies, and student thinking as they implement reform. This study extends such work by examining how one elementary school and...

Focusing on expanding technical capabilities and new collaborative possibilities, we address 4 challenges for scientists who collect and use video records to conduct research in and on complex learning environments: (a) Selection: How can researchers be systematic in deciding which elements of a complex environment or extensive video corpus to sele...

Our methodology was designed to tap directly into teachers' in-the-moment noticing in a way that has not been possible before. Specifically, the idea is that the clips themselves have the potential to reveal the kinds of events that teachers pay attention to during instruction. In addition, the hope is that teachers' comments in the interviews will...

Understanding teacher cognition - and in particular teacher noticing - poses significant challenges to researchers because of the ongoing nature of teaching. To overcome those challenges learning science researchers have used a variety of methods to help them understand how teachers reason and make decisions while teaching. In this symposium we des...

The goal of this paper is to introduce the curriculum strategy framework as a way to characterize teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials. The framework focuses on three key interpretive activities: reading, evaluating, and adapting curriculum materials. Describing an individual teacher’s curriculum strategy involves identifying the manner...

This study explores the use of video clips from teachers' own classrooms as a resource for investigating student mathematical thinking. Three dimensions for characterizing video clips of student mathematical thinking are introduced: the extent to which a clip provides windows into student thinking, the depth of thinking shown, and the clarity of th...

This article examines a model of professional development called “video clubs” in which teachers watch and discuss excerpts of videos from their classrooms. We investigate how participation in a video club influences teachers’ thinking and practice by exploring three related contexts: (a) teachers’ comments during video-club meetings, (b) teachers’...

Classroom video excerpts are often used to help preservice and practicing teachers explore students' mathematical ideas. This article describes several types of video clips that the authors have found to be particularly productive for this purpose.

This study investigates mathematics teacher learning in a video-based professional development environment calledvideo clubs. In particular, the authors explore whether teachers develop professional vision, the ability to notice and interpret signif- icant features of classroom interactions, as they participate in a video club. Analysis for the stu...

This study examines changes in teachers’ thinking as they participated in a video club designed to help them learn to notice and interpret students’ mathematical thinking. First, we investigate changes in teachers’ talk about classroom video segments before and after participation in the video club. Second, we identify three paths along which teach...

In this article, the authors explore how the pervasive availability of technology allows for new social arrangements in teacher education by connecting preservice teachers, school-based personnel, university faculty, and others in deep and engaging ways. The authors illustrate this perspective and then propose four implications for teacher educatio...

In this article we examine the development, over 1 year, of mathematical discourse communities in 2 eighth-grade mathematics classes in a suburban public middle school. The curriculum topics included probability, functions, graphing, data analysis, and pre-algebra. The 50 students were heterogeneously placed; most were from upper-middle-class famil...

The use of reform-based curricula is one possible avenue for the widespread implementation of mathematics education reform. In this article, we present two urban elementary teachers' models of curriculum use that describe how each teacher used a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum. In particular, we examine when and how the teachers made adaptat...

This discussion forum, an outcome of fruitful collaboration between researchers in the U.S and Germany, focuses on mathematics education research in the context of teaching videos and analyses common findings and their implications for research, teaching and learning of mathematics. We address several important issues such as the use and analysis o...

This paper examines how video can be used to help pre-service and in-service teachers learn to notice what is happening in their classrooms. Data from two related studies are presented. In the first study, middle-school mathematics teachers met monthly in a video club in which they shared and discussed excerpts of videos from their classrooms. In t...

Education research in learning and teaching has alternated historically between periods in which subject matter disciplines were used as the organizing framework for investigation and implementation, and other periods in which the content areas nearly disappeared in favour of a quest for generic principles of instruction that could transcend discip...

This is the fifth in a series that examines the challenges that teachers in different domains face as they attempt to implement the pedagogical reform 'Fostering a Community of Learners' (FCL). Here we focus on the relationship between FCL and the teaching of mathematics. We argue that it is possible to teach mathematics through the FCL pedagogy, b...

The transformation to reform mathematics teaching is a daunting task. It is often unclear to teachers what such a classroom would really look like, let alone how to get there. This article addresses this question: How does a teacher, along with her students, go about establishing the sort of classroom community that can enact reform mathematics pra...

This paper examines one model of professional development, the use of video clubs in which groups of teachers watch and discuss videotapes of their classrooms. Specifically, the paper investigates the learning that occurred as four middle-school mathematics teachers participated in a year-long series of video club meetings. Over time, discourse in...

This chapter examines the role that video has played since its introduction to teacher education in the 1960s. The chapter first reviews several leading innovations that have been popular across the last forty years. I then argue that in the past, teacher education has not always capitalized on the features of video that make it particularly useful...

What types of things do you typically notice as you watch your students in class each day? For instance, when the bell rings at the start of class, what do you look for as you scan the room? Later on, when you see a group of students interacting, what do you tend to notice about their work together? And in class discussions, which of the ideas that...

Examined how video clubs (ongoing discussions of videotaped classroom instruction) supported the development of productive conversations among teachers and educational researchers. Analysis of six video clubs involving high school mathematics teachers and a university researcher illustrated the complementary character of expertise the participants...

This article examines the pedagogical tensions involved in trying to usestudents' ideas as the basis for class discussion while also ensuring thatdiscussion is productive mathematically. The data for this study of theteaching of one middle-school teacher come from observations andvideotapes of instruction across a school year as well as interviews...

This research examines the role of teachers' content knowledge during the implementation of mathematics education reform. Current mathematics education reform efforts require teachers to learn in the act of teaching. I claim that this learning occurs as teachers negotiate among 3 areas of their content knowledge: their understanding of the subject...

Mathematics and science education reforms encourage teachers to base their instruction in part on the lesson as it unfolds in the classroom, paying particular attention to the ideas that students raise. This ability to adapt instruction in the moment requires that teachers be able to notice and interpret aspects of classroom interactions that are k...

Three years ago, the authors of this article began to work together to develop a middle school classroom in which students talk about mathematics. We found that getting students to talk about mathematics was easy—in fact, students were eager to share their ideas. More challenging was finding ways to encourage students to interpret and comment on th...

Prompting students to talk about mathematics is an important goal of mathematics education reform. Teachers are encouraged to provide opportunities for students to discuss their ideas about mathematics and to listen closely to what students say. Yet managing such discourse is no easy task and can present teachers with many new challenges (Ball 1991...

Through vidio clubs, teachers gain opportunities to investigate their teaching practices and to better understand what is happening in their classrooms.

This article explores the nature of teacher knowledge as it is portrayed by Schoenfeld's model of teaching. We attempt to situate Schoenfeld's work in the field of teacher knowledge and to elucidate the contribution that he makes to the growing body of research in this area. Towards this end, we explore two related issues. First, we distinguish bet...

The goal in this work was to study how a professional assessment of teaching can be developed that will have a positive impact on the professional development of teachers who participate, either as candidates or evaluators. Our hypothesis was that such a positive Impact depends upon two factors: on teachers developing a socially shared language of...

Learning science research has examined how external representations can be used to foster student reasoning and understanding. This paper describes additional roles that students' representations play in a reform mathematics classroom. The paper describes three ways in which students' representations were used in a classroom: (a) to provide informa...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Science and Mathematics Education)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257).