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Examining the Responding Component of Teacher Noticing: A Case of One Teacher’s Pedagogical Responses to Students’ Thinking in Classroom Artifacts
Abstract
In this study, we investigated how an experienced fourth-grade teacher responded to her students’ thinking as part of her teacher noticing practice in a formative assessment context. Our primary purpose in doing this work was to decompose the responding component of teacher noticing and use our findings to present an emerging framework characterizing the multidimensional nature of this practice. We present two key outcomes based on the findings of this work. First, we show how a formative assessment context situated outside of instruction can engage teachers in practice-based noticing. Second, we present an emerging framework of the responding component of teacher noticing and discuss how it can be used by teacher educators to engage teachers in analytic work in ways that reveal the relationships between what teachers see in students’ thinking and how, when, and toward whom they respond.
... Reflective noticing helps teachers be attentive and present to student learning and thinking (Rodgers, 2002). As an iterative process, teacher noticing involves (a) attending to students' ideas and learning events (e.g., scientific facts, unusual questions, partial explanations) in an instructional setting, (b) interpreting what the ideas and events mean, and (c) envisioning and taking pedagogical responses to enhance student learning and participation (Luna & Selmer, 2021;Watkins & Manz, 2022). The teacher detects important information about what is going on in the classroom, analyzes and interprets what the information means concerning learning goals, and decides how to respond to further student learning (Barnhart & van Es, 2015;Luna, 2018). ...
... Among the elements of teacher noticing, existing studies have gained much knowledge about teachers' attention and interpretation in science classrooms (Berland et al., 2020;Luna, 2018;Luna & Selmer, 2021;Russ, 2018). For example, productive teachers attend to students' scientific thinking, including the conceptual content and forms of student ideas, their processes of idea production, and relationships among ideas generated in different activity contexts. ...
... They also notice disciplinary practices and norms, such as building scientific models and engaging in science talks and argumentation. As a gap in the literature, very few studies have looked at how teachers generate responsive decisions and actions based on what they have noticed in students' thinking and discourse over time (Dini et al., 2020;König et al., 2022;Luna & Selmer, 2021). Investigating teachers' noticing and responsive decisions is critical to support collaborative knowledge building in which students enact high-level agency. ...
In classrooms that implement student-driven, collaborative knowledge building, there is a lot for teachers to attend to in student work, alongside numerous ways of interpreting and responding to what is noticed, giving rise to countless possibilities of furthering students’ inquiry and discourse. The current study aims to make sense of these possibilities by identifying patterns in a veteran teacher’s reflective noticing of student inquiry in two Grade 5 classrooms. Using a Knowledge Building approach, the fifth graders studied the human body systems supported by a collaborative online environment (Knowledge Forum) over an eight-month period. The teacher kept weekly journals to record her reflective noticing of student inquiry and envisioning (planning) of possible ways to facilitate deeper knowledge building work. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyzed the teacher’s reflective journal entries to identify critical themes characterizing the teacher’s attention, interpretation, and planning of responsive moves. Visual network analysis further traced multiple pathways of teacher noticing and envisioning, each involving attending to specific changes in student inquiry and discourse, interpreting these changes within a temporal context, and envisioning responsive actions that could be taken up with her students. The teacher’s responsive moves focused on leveraging student-generated ideas to unfold new possibilities of deepening, expanding, or better co-regulating their inquiry and discourse. The findings shed light on how teachers may work with emergent processes of student-driven inquiry to scaffold ever-deeper knowledge building in a collaborative community.
... The framework provides a way for science education researchers to analyze noticing from a video club, specific to a science context and in a way that permits claims about changes in noticing over time. Luna and Selmer (2021) propose connections between research on noticing and formative assessment. Considering Dini et al. (2020), they claim there are commonalities between noticing and formative assessment but argue that the two are not interchangeable. ...
... Furthermore, the framework provides a way to better analyze the interplay of formative assessment and noticing. Luna and Selmer (2021) found that "a formative assessment context situated outside of instruction can engage teachers in practice-based noticing" (p. 578) and the framework focused on responding can support teacher learning of responding. ...
... When considering articles that have more recently been cited in science education noticing, Luna emerges as a prominent researcher in the field, because the prevalence of the work and the emphasis on empirically expanding ideas of noticing within a science context. Luna and Selmer (2021) draw connections between noticing and formative assessment, Zummo et al. (2022) draw connections between noticing and pedagogical content knowledge, and Schwarz et al. (2021) draw connections between noticing and sense-making. Therefore, a third theme in the science education noticing literature, based on these recent studies, is the attempt to draw connections between noticing and other aspects of effective teaching (formative assessment, sense-making, pedagogical content knowledge) in analysis frameworks. ...
We review analytic frameworks related to the study of noticing in mathematics and science education for the purpose of suggesting trends in research literature across both disciplines over time. We focus on highly cited articles in both mathematics and science noticing research, along with recent articles in both disciplines. We focus specifically on research articles that include an analytic framework, to understand the state of how data on noticing are analyzed. We conducted an extensive review of literature, intentionally related to population, temporality, methodology, and quality. The purpose was to provide an overview of the field of noticing, based on particular search criteria for articles including an analytic framework. To be considered an analytic framework, the article had to include a framework that could be used to analyze teacher noticing. We found frameworks in science education are frequently adapted from mathematics education and are moving toward pairing noticing with aspects of effective instruction (formative assessment, sense-making, pedagogical content knowledge), whereas the frameworks in mathematics education now consider context and equity, which was not an explicit focus in the initial noticing literature.
... Responding is a challenging and distinct skill from noticing student thinking (Harris et al., 2012;Luna & Selmer, 2021). It is also arguably the most important-taking up and pursuing students' ideas is what makes teaching responsive (Robertston et al., 2016). ...
... Analyzing video clips in teacher preparation often focuses on an accomplished teacher (e.g., ATLAS video library) or a short video clip from the PSTs' classroom for the purpose of understanding the significance of particular moments within the clip. There has been less attention on how PSTs use information from these moments to think about how to respond to student thinking (Luna & Selmer, 2021). This study examines how and why PSTs plan to respond to moments they notice in a video clip of a science classroom episode. ...
... Providing them with the opportunities to learn to how to be responsive to students' thinking is essential if the eventual goal is to help PSTs to know how to work with students' ideas in the moment of teaching. Luna and Selmer's (2021) framework for decomposing responding is an important step in clarifying how teacher educators can help PSTs to think about and enact ways to use students' ideas to support their learning. To be clear, we do not view this work as teaching PSTs specific, prescriptive sets of moves to use in particular circumstances. ...
Research has demonstrated that pre-service teachers (PSTs) can learn to notice students’ thinking in sophisticated ways by analyzing videos of classroom interactions. What is less clear is how PSTs use what they notice about student thinking to inform how they respond. Secondary math and science PSTs from three teacher preparation programs were invited to analyze a video clip identifying noteworthy moments of student thinking and describing an instructional move they might make and why. A qualitative analysis of their responses indicates that the PSTs overwhelmingly noticed both the substance and the source of students’ ideas. However, the patterns in their responses to these moments varied. These findings suggest that PSTs would benefit from spending more time unpacking what it means to respond to students’ thinking. The study provides implications for teacher education concerning the careful selection of classroom clips and tools to support
novice teachers developing responsive teaching practices.
... Instructional practices broadly described as responsive teaching can support students' sense-making in science and math (Jacobs et al., 2010;Levin et al., 2009;Luna & Selmer, 2021). Responsive teaching in science education foregrounds the substance of students' ideas; recognizes the disciplinary connections within those ideas; and takes up and pursues the substance of students' thinking (Robertson et al., 2016). ...
... (1) what teachers attend to, or selecting what is important amidst the many possible foci for attention in classroom interactions (Van Es & Sherin, 2008); (2) how teachers interpret or make sense of the objects of their attention, which can involve a variety of reasoning practices (Dyer & Sherin, 2016;Fernández et al., 2013;Goldsmith & Seago, 2011); and (3) how teachers respond, or the teacher actions that occur as a result of their attending and interpretation either in the moment or planned future action (Jacobs et al., 2010;Jacobs & Spangler, 2017;Luna & Selmer, 2021). ...
... Chan et al.'s (2021) review also found that most teacher noticing studies in science education focused on the first two components of the noticing framework (teacher attention and interpretation) but often did not focus on teachers' responses. A recent study specifically focused on responding (Luna & Selmer, 2021) did so in the context of one teacher's responses to student artifacts after instruction. This teacher's responses included both reflections on actions that had occurred during instruction as well as plans for future actions. ...
Calls to immerse students in the sensemaking practices of science recommend that students propose ideas and work together to construct explanations as well as drive the evaluation and decision-making around classroom knowledge-building. In other words, they should be participating with epistemic agency. Part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for student contributions and negotiations during sensemaking. The type of space that is opened up for students’ sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers’ choices and interpretations of student contributions. Accordingly, this paper leverages a teacher noticing framework to begin to characterize the teacher noticing and decision-making involved in supporting students’ epistemic agency while teaching. Using a novel point-of-view video collection methodology, we asked two teachers to identify moments while teaching in which they were making a decision about how to open up or close down space for students’ epistemic agency. We found that both teachers attended similarly to the disciplinary substance of students’ ideas; the epistemic nature of students’ ideas; students’ epistemic stance or orientation during participation; and students’ overall degree of engagement. Teachers’ responses to students varied across pedagogical phenomena, and they also varied in their effectiveness. These variations were related to each teacher’s conception of epistemic agency. We propose that attention to the epistemic nature of students’ responses and to students’ epistemic stance or orientation may be especially important foci of teacher attention for supporting students’ epistemic agency.
... Several studies note how degrees of sophistication in the use of noticing skills contribute to differential uptake of reform practices, and suggest that noticing skills may play an important role in teacher change ( , 2015;Jacobs et al., 2010;Luna & Selmer, 2021;Sherin, 2002). For example, Franke et al.'s (2001) study of differential uptake of reform practices among 22 teachers in one school district found that teachers who engaged in their own sensemaking around students' learning processes-characteristics they described as "generative change (p. ...
... Privileging the canonical "right answer" (Barnhart & van Es, 2015;Colley & Windschitl, 2016) Margaret discarded all other student ideas posted on the classroom KLEWS chart, shutting down discussion and effectively denying other students' participation in knowledge building. As a result, she also deprived herself of an opportunity to learn by leveraging their thinking (Colley & Windschitl, 2016;Luna & Selmer, 2021). ...
... Emily interpreted this as a breakthrough in the child's sensemaking, and made her thinking public, a response critical to student learning (Luna & Selmer, 2021;Roth et al., 2011). During her interview, Emily relived the moment, "That was super awesome! ...
... Instructional practices broadly described as responsive teaching can support students' sense-making in science and math (Jacobs et al., 2010;Levin et al., 2009;Luna & Selmer, 2021). Responsive teaching in science education foregrounds the substance of students' ideas; recognizes the disciplinary connections within those ideas; and takes up and pursues the substance of students' thinking (Robertson et al., 2016). ...
... (1) what teachers attend to, or selecting what is important amidst the many possible foci for attention in classroom interactions (Van Es & Sherin, 2008); (2) how teachers interpret or make sense of the objects of their attention, which can involve a variety of reasoning practices (Dyer & Sherin, 2016;Fernández et al., 2013;Goldsmith & Seago, 2011); and (3) how teachers respond, or the teacher actions that occur as a result of their attending and interpretation either in the moment or planned future action (Jacobs et al., 2010;Jacobs & Spangler, 2017;Luna & Selmer, 2021). ...
... Chan et al.'s (2021) review also found that most teacher noticing studies in science education focused on the first two components of the noticing framework (teacher attention and interpretation) but often did not focus on teachers' responses. A recent study specifically focused on responding (Luna & Selmer, 2021) did so in the context of one teacher's responses to student artifacts after instruction. This teacher's responses included both reflections on actions that had occurred during instruction as well as plans for future actions. ...
Participating in science practices requires that students take intellectual ownership in developing explanatory science ideas. We refer to students’ roles in making those decisions as epistemic agency Supporting students’ epistemic agency is pedagogically challenging in that it requires teachers to notice, interpret, and respond to an even greater range of classroom instances than those related to responsive teaching, all in real time and with a great deal of uncertainty and variation. This paper extends a framework for teacher noticing developed in mathematics education to characterize the noticing practices of two experienced teachers who both expressed commitments to supporting students’
epistemic agency. We identified three categories of pedagogical phenomena that they noticed: (1) student ideas; (2) student participation; and (3) curricular enactment. We also characterized five types of responses to those phenomena that varied along two dimensions: whether the response was active vs. passive, and whether their intent in responding was to expand or diminish space for the observed phenomenon. These findings are important additions to a noticing framework for epistemic agency and contribute to the development of tools that can support both research and practice around supporting
students’ epistemic agency in science learning.
... Van Es (2011) separated noticing into discrete levels that describe learning to notice. Luna and Selmer (2021) focused just on the practice of responding and characterizing its multidimensional aspects. Researchers of other published frameworks have attached importance to certain types of noticing (e.g., Jacobs et al., 2010;Mitchell & Marin, 2015;Teuscher et al., 2017;van Es & Sherin, 2008) because analyzing the structural components of noticing makes it more learnable and understandable, ultimately resulting in instructional improvement (Saclarides & Lubienski, 2021;Santagata, 2011). ...
... As we consider the framework from a mathematics teacher educator perspective and consider "lifting" up (Prediger et al., 2019, p. 413) key aspects from teacher noticing to mathematics teacher educator noticing, we question the essential aspects the field of mathematics education would want those coaching to notice-in other words, what is the goal or desired output for mathematics teacher educator noticing, as we think about decomposing the practice of noticing? Similar to Luna and Selmer's (2021) framework, we heed the call in the field to publish a framework that articulates the aspects of mathematics teacher educator noticing that are essential and is based on existing research about what it means to notice and what it means to coach (Baker, 2022;Gibbons & Cobb, 2017;Jacobs et al., 2010;König et al., 2022). Analyzing the structural building blocks of what it means for a mathematics teacher educator to notice, and eventually, what is critical for those coaching to notice, it is essential to know how to support mathematics teacher educators to understand better how coaching can support mathematics teachers. ...
Building on research on teacher noticing, the goal of this study was to understand what and how mathematics teacher educators notice critical events and how they make connections to consider the characteristics of distinguished coach noticing, meaning the noticing we would hope those coaching would attain to support teachers. We interviewed 29 mathematics teacher educators in two different experience groups and asked them to respond to vignettes of coach–teacher interactions. We modified an existing analytic framework from teacher noticing research for the coaching context, deeming it the Mathematics Teacher Educator Noticing Framework. Results (a) provide characteristics of distinguished noticing for WHAT mathematics teacher educators notice, with a focus on noticing as related to critical events and (b) describe characteristics of distinguished noticing for HOW mathematics educators notice, with a focus on connecting critical events and principles of learning and/or coaching along with principles in distinguished noticing involving coaching discourse. We describe the differences between two different coach populations—mentor coaches and participant coaches. The findings describe what constitutes critical events for mathematics teacher educator noticing and describe distinguished noticing by illuminating the connections made between critical events (what is noticed) and connections between critical events and principles of teaching and learning (how noticing occurs). Further, findings revealed differing quantities of relationships between teacher thinking and/or coaching actions, suggesting variability in how distinguished mathematics teacher educator noticing occurs.
... While all examples of practice were the same media type, educators' noticing differed according to the particularities of the video content, for instance, with more attention to a learner response in a familiar classroom situation compared to an unfamiliar one. In a deviation from video evidence, M. Luna and Selmer (2021) uniquely focus on teachers' noticing of learner thinking elicited using artifacts learners produce. The authors discuss how artifacts create a noticing context that can be uniquely formative and inform teachers' awareness of particular pedagogical responses they need to make to support learners' developing thinking. ...
... Though research cited in earlier sections indicates opportunities inherent in diverse forms of evidence (e.g, student artifacts in M. Luna & Selmer, 2021), we uniquely consider contexts in which diverse forms of evidence are shared that differ between members within a single cohort. Our research suggests PL thoughtfully designed with the unique noticing opportunities of evidence of practice in mind may enrich conversations around the STEM facilitation skill by drawing out the most salient features and creating a natural window through which participants may leverage their own experience to inform their noticing. ...
... Several studies have identified strategies for supporting prospective teachers in developing this practice [9,10]. Other studies focus specifically on teacher decisions about how to respond and identify decide actions or teacher moves that work to support responsive teaching [11,12]. This study captures a unique snapshot of eight prospective teachers' professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking just prior to student teaching. ...
... Using open coding we identified six codes to capture the different decide actions posed by the participants. We refined these codes using prior studies [11,12,23]. We then determined if a decide action was responsive to student thinking by examining if each decide action was focused on taking-up and pursuing student thinking rather than fixing student thinking [7,23]. ...
In this study, prospective teachers engaged in professional noticing of their students’ mathematical thinking captured in pieces of written work. Researchers then worked to characterize the prospective teachers’ professional noticing using a lens of responsive teaching. Results indicate that prospective teacher decisions about how to respond to their students’ mathematical thinking fall on a responsiveness continuum, often shifting in responsiveness across pieces of student written work. The findings of this study provide guidance for teacher educators who work to develop K–12 educators’ responsive teaching practices.
... However, researchers have found that evaluations or judgments of teachers' actions sometimes take precedence in conversation (Borko et al., 2008;Sherin & van Es, 2009). Thus, fostering discourse that centers on noticing and interpreting student thinking and racialized classroom phenomena, as well as supporting teachers in responding effectively to what they notice (Luna & Selmer, 2021), is another important challenge in professional learning settings. ...
... At the same time, prior research has highlighted the importance of promoting deep dialogue about the relationship between student thinking, racialized classroom phenomena, and teachers' instructional moves (e.g., Horn & Little, 2010;Shah & Coles, 2020). Offering a suggestion right away might short-circuit this process (Segal et al., 2018), or alternatively support the development of strong pedagogical responses to teachers' noticings (Luna & Selmer, 2021). Future research might delve more deeply into the nature of such suggestions, examining their relationship to ongoing productive discourse. ...
In this article, we examine the promise of a popular set of sentence stems, “I notice” and “I wonder,” for fostering productive discussion in an online course for teachers. Drawing on teachers’ responses to one another’s classroom reflections, we look for evidence regarding how course prompts encouraging teachers to use these stems influence the types of contributions teachers offer. We analyze teachers’ responses at the module, response, and sentence level, situating our inquiry in the context of common challenges related to discourse in teacher professional learning contexts. Our findings suggest that prompting teachers to report what they “notice” and what they “wonder” may support the development of teachers’ professional vision and exposure to diverse perspectives.
... Guru menggunakan berbagai strategi untuk mengatasi hambatan epistemologi siswa, termasuk: 1. Penggunaan Media Visual: Menggunakan diagram, grafik, dan video untuk membantu siswa memahami konsep abstrak (Kosko et al., 2021;Nagro et al., 2020). 2. Pendekatan Kolaboratif: Mendorong siswa untuk bekerja dalam kelompok kecil untuk memecahkan masalah matematika, yang membantu mereka membangun pemahaman melalui diskusi (Fernández et al., 2020;Luna & Selmer, 2021). 3. Refleksi Diri Siswa: Guru memberikan tugas reflektif yang mendorong siswa untuk mengevaluasi pemahaman mereka sendiri terhadap konsep tertentu (Stockero et al., 2017;van Es et al., 2022). ...
Abstrak Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji peran noticing guru dalam mengatasi hambatan epistemologi siswa pada pembelajaran matematika. Noticing guru didefinisikan sebagai kemampuan mengamati, menganalisis, dan merespons dinamika kelas untuk mendukung pembelajaran siswa. Penelitian ini menjawab tiga pertanyaan utama: (1) bagaimana kemampuan noticing guru dalam mengidentifikasi hambatan epistemologi siswa? (2) apa saja faktor-faktor yang memengaruhi kemampuan noticing guru? dan (3) bagaimana strategi praktis guru dalam mengatasi hambatan epistemologi siswa melalui pendekatan noticing? Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan desain studi teoritis yang didukung oleh data empiris dari penelitian relevan. Data dikumpulkan melalui analisis literatur, dokumentasi studi kasus, dan analisis data sekunder yang mencakup wawancara dan observasi kelas dari penelitian sebelumnya. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa noticing guru berperan penting dalam mengidentifikasi hambatan epistemologi siswa, seperti kesulitan memahami konsep abstrak dan keterbatasan transfer pengetahuan. Kemampuan noticing guru dipengaruhi oleh faktor-faktor seperti pengalaman mengajar, pelatihan profesional, dan sikap guru terhadap potensi siswa. Guru yang memiliki kemampuan noticing yang baik menggunakan berbagai strategi, termasuk pendekatan dialogis, scaffolding, media visual, dan refleksi diri siswa, untuk membantu siswa mengatasi hambatan epistemologi mereka. Penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa noticing guru merupakan keterampilan pedagogis yang penting untuk meningkatkan efektivitas pembelajaran matematika. Dengan mengintegrasikan noticing ke dalam pelatihan profesional dan praktik pembelajaran, guru dapat membantu siswa memahami konsep matematika dengan lebih baik dan mengatasi hambatan epistemologi yang mereka alami. Abstract This study aims to examine the role of teacher noticing in overcoming students' epistemological barriers in mathematics learning. Teacher noticing is defined as the ability to observe, analyze, and respond to classroom dynamics to support student learning. This study answers three main questions: (1) how are teachers' noticing skills in identifying students' epistemological barriers? (2) what are the factors that influence teachers' noticing skills? and (3) how are teachers' practical strategies in overcoming students' epistemological barriers through the noticing approach? This research uses a qualitative approach with a theoretical study design supported by empirical data from relevant research. Data were collected through literature analysis, case study documentation, and secondary data analysis that included interviews and classroom observations from previous research. The results showed that teacher noticing plays an important role in identifying students' epistemological barriers, such as difficulties in understanding abstract concepts and limitations in knowledge transfer. Teachers' noticing ability is influenced by factors such as teaching experience, professional training, and teachers' attitudes towards students' potential. Teachers who have good noticing ability use various strategies, including dialogic approaches, scaffolding, visual media, and student self-reflection, to help students overcome their epistemological barriers. This study concluded that
... Addressing student thinking presents a unique and demanding skill that differs from merely observing it (Harris et al., 2012;Luna & Selmer, 2021). Moreover, this skill is arguably the most vital component of effective teaching, as actively engaging with and developing students' ideas is what ultimately makes instruction adaptable and responsive (Robertston et al., 2016). ...
This study aimed to explore the challenges faced by pre-service teachers in Iran in noticing and responding to student thought processes during English language instruction, as well as the strategies they employed to engage with student thinking. Utilizing grounded theory and qualitative analysis, the research sought to provide a deeper understanding of these challenges and strategies to inform teacher education practices. The findings revealed significant difficulties in recognizing diverse student thinking and managing classroom dynamics. To address these challenges, pre-service teachers adopted strategies such as open-ended questions and group discussions, which fostered deeper understanding, clarified students' ideas, and promoted a more interactive learning environment. The results highlighted the urgent need for teacher education programs in Iran to develop skills that enhance the ability to respond to students' thinking. Specifically, programs should focus on competencies such as pedagogical competence, cognitive skills, interpersonal communication, reflective practice, technological proficiency, and entrepreneurial competencies. By strengthening these competencies, pre-service teachers can improve their English instruction and effectiveness. Educational programs could benefit from integrating practical experiences like micro-teaching sessions and workshops on effective questioning techniques. This approach will better prepare future educators to navigate student engagement, leading to more effective teaching practices in Iran's educational landscape.
... Decision-making was the most complex skill to develop for preservice teachers. Luna and Selmer (2021) investigated how an experienced primary school teacher responds to her students' thinking as part of her teacher observation practice. To do this, the teacher investigated the students' thinking based on evidence from their lessons and discussed this thinking. ...
At a time when more student-centred teaching methodologies are being introduced, it is essential to investigate how educational research in teacher professional development has progressed. In this study, we focus especially on mathematics teaching to promote responsive teaching and noticing since both practices place students in the foreground in the teaching and learning processes. To this end, we carried out a systematic review of research articles published between 2010 and 2023 in the Web of Science and SCOPUS databases on responsive teaching and noticing in mathematics teacher education programmes of early childhood and primary school levels. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement, 40 articles were identified. The general results show that the most productive countries were the United States, Spain and Australia; that the most addressed mathematical contents were those related to the teaching of numbers, operations and their properties; that there are more studies focused on primary school than on preschool; and that most studies used qualitative methodologies. The specific results show that the research topics focus on three aspects: teachers’ decision-making in relation to culturally responsive mathematics teaching; the identification of general characteristics of the noticing competence in mathematics teaching; and the specific development of professional noticing skills.
... The third facet of teacher noticing is decision-making Santagata & Yeh, 2016). In the present study, decision-making refers both to the inthe-moment decisions that teachers make during teaching (Santagata & Yeh, 2016) and to the alternative teaching moves (Keller et al., 2022;Luna & Selmer, 2021;Simpson, 2019;Santagata & Guarino, 2011), what if-scenarios (Munson et al., 2021), and the next steps that teachers and teacher candidates might suggest when reviewing videos of their teaching (Jacobs et al., 2010;Jacobs et al., 2023;Santagata & Guarino, 2011). Not all researchers incorporate decision-making in their analysis of noticing (e.g., van Es & Sherin, 2021). ...
This study argues that to educate first language (L1) teachers who are responsive to students’ needs, we must pay attention to the invisible but fundamental processes of teacher noticing. Teacher noticing—how teachers perceive, interpret, and make decisions about how to respond to student ideas and needs during teaching—is scarcely studied within language and literature education. In this qualitative study, I examine the characteristics of mentoring conversations in which teacher candidates and their mentors discuss videos of the candidates’ L1 teaching in terms of the critical moments (Myhill & Warren, 2005) they attended to, their interpretations of these critical moments, and their decision-making on how to respond to these moments. The findings show that the candidates and mentors attended to various opportunities to scaffold student text production and interpretation, as well as opportunities to elicit and respond to student ideas in text-based discussions. Adopting an evaluative stance toward these critical moments supported the candidates in identifying alternative teaching moves, while adopting an inquiry stance led them to identify the first paths toward more adaptive teaching. These findings suggest that video-based mentoring conversations have the potential to support L1 teacher candidates in learning to notice and have implications for teacher education coursework and fieldwork.
... While many studies focused on investigating how preservice and in-service (elementary, middle, or high school) science and mathematics teachers interpret and respond to student explanations [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], none dealt with physics teachers exclusively. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address this research gap by studying how physics teachers interpret and respond to students' written explanations of their answers to a complex physics problem. ...
Research carried out through the last 20 years gave us undeniable evidence that to learn anything we need to be active participants, not passive observers. One of the important aspects of learning physics is constructing explanations of physical phenomena. To support and guide students toward constructing their explanations, teachers need to be attentive and responsive to students’ explanations. To learn how physics teachers interpret and respond to students’ explanations we investigated pre- and in-service physics teachers’ responses to students’ written explanations of their answers to a complex physics problem. The survey administered to the participants included the problem statement and four authentic student explanations. The participants were asked to identify each student’s strengths and weaknesses and to provide a response to that student. We found that while the participants were successful in identifying productive and problematic aspects of student reasoning, they rarely built on student reasoning when responding to the students, mostly focusing on addressing problematic aspects. The paper discusses why this finding is important for physics teacher preparation programs and professional development programs.
Published by the American Physical Society 2024
... This framework directs analytic attention to teachers' cognition in the midst of teaching rather than only teachers' observable actions or behaviors. The AIR framework highlights three interrelated processes involved in noticing and responding to student thinking: (1) what teachers attend (A) to, or selecting what is important amidst the many possible foci for attention in classroom interactions (van Es & Sherin, 2008); (2) how teachers interpret (I) or make sense of the objects of their attention, which can involve a variety of reasoning practices (Dyer & Sherin, 2016;Fern andez et al., 2013;Goldsmith & Seago, 2011);and (3) how teachers respond (R), or the teacher actions that occur as a result of their attending and interpretation either in the moment or planned future action (Jacobs et al., 2010;Jacobs & Spangler, 2017;Luna & Selmer, 2021). What teachers attend to and how they interpret it matters in terms of how they respond, or the pedagogical choices they make. ...
Teaching to support students' sense‐making is challenging. It requires continuous, context‐dependent decision‐making about which student ideas to pursue, when, how, and why. This paper presents a single case study of an experienced teacher, Nadine, as an illustrative case in order to provide a rich description of this teacher's decisional episodes. Specifically, we characterize Nadine's pedagogical reasoning for decisions to make space for or close down student sense‐making while facilitating whole‐class discussions. We analyzed video recordings of (1) Nadine's classroom teaching over the course of two instructional units, (2) classroom moments tagged by Nadine or researchers in the midst of her teaching capturing her rationales for instructional decisions, and (3) interviews about those tagged moments. Using constant‐comparative analytic methods, we identified three dimensions of criteria that Nadine considered in her decisions about whether to pursue student ideas: (1) disciplinary potential, (2) potential for fostering the classroom community, and (3) curricular considerations. We present four episodes that feature Nadine's reasoning, two in which she intentionally made space for student sense‐making and two in which she intentionally closed down lines of student reasoning. Regardless of the decision, the criteria Nadine considered were sometimes aligned, supporting a straightforward decision, and other times created tensions. Across four episodes, we show how Nadine navigated multidimensional criteria; considered students' long‐term trajectories; and considered for whom pursuing sense‐making would be beneficial. We argue that these navigational considerations might serve as focal points as teachers, researchers, and professional learning facilitators make sense of teachers' instructional decisions as they occur during instruction and that leveraging them to open opportunities for discourse with teachers can support complex teaching practices.
... We turn to research on teacher noticing to frame teachers' attention and sensemaking of student thinking for enacting responsive teaching. Across the literature is a wide consensus that core to responsive teaching is teachers' ongoing attention and sensemaking of student thinking and using their evolving understanding of students' thinking to move students' learning forward (Barnhart & van Es, 2015, Blömeke et al., 2015Jacobs et al., 2010;Luna, 2018;Luna & Selmer, 2021;Richards & Robertson, 2016;Tekkumru-Kisa et al., 2022;Sherin & van Es, 2009;Thomas et al., 2021;van Es & Sherin, 2021). More recent research refines and expands the fields' understanding of noticing for responsive teaching. ...
This study investigates challenges of enactment teachers notice when analyzing artifacts of teaching in a professional development focused on supporting the enactment of NGSS‐aligned modeling instruction. Five secondary science teachers participated in a semester‐long video club. Transcripts of the segments of their meetings in which they analyzed artifacts of practice were coded to characterize what they noticed in videos and student work samples from their own and others’ classrooms of students engaging in sensemaking. Through an inductive and iterative approach, three main linguistic challenges were identified related to the teachers’ noticing of students’ disciplinary thinking: learning how to communicate with precision using modeling conventions, how to communicate with precision using scientific vocabulary, and how to support students explaining and defending their models. The findings of this study extend and affirm prior research on teachers’ noticing of student thinking by highlighting the integrated nature of disciplinary noticing and the entanglement of learning science concepts and the language of science. The results also indicate that artifact‐rich professional development designed to improve science teachers’ interpretation of their students’ thinking can support teachers as they work through problems of practice they encounter in their attempts to enact responsive science teaching.
... Complete articles published in international journals from 2016-2023, indexed in databases, and themed STEM education in science learning. (Kintu et al., 2017); (Hailikari et al., 2022) Learning objectives (Erlia, 2021); (Luna & Selmer, 2021); (Keiler, 2018) Teacher (Firnando Sabetra et al., 2021); (Case, 2022); (Kumar & Sharma, 2021) Students (Abdulrahaman et al., 2020); (González-Pérez & Ramírez-Montoya, 2022); (Fernández-Río, 2016) Materials (Miranda et al., 2021); (Thomas et al., 2021); (Loeng, 2020) Learning methods (Sorohiti & Aini, 2021); (Dziuban et al., 2018); (Lin et al., 2017) Instructional Media (Swiecki et al., 2022); (Masih & Ariana, 2018); (Nugraha et al., 2018) Evaluation Learning is an activity that intentionally modifies various conditions directed at achieving a goal, namely achieving curriculum goals. Meanwhile, in daily life in schools, the term learning or the learning process is often understood to be the same as the teaching and learning process in which there is interaction between teachers and students and between fellow students to achieve a goal, namely changes in student attitudes and behavior.From the table above it can be explained that the components in learning consist of objectives in learning which are important components that must be determined in the learning process which has a function as a benchmark for learning success. ...
As one of the efforts to produce Sumber Human Resources (HR) who have century competence 21st, a learning design is needed which integrates skills or 21st century skills. By including students are involved in remembering, understanding, apply, analyze, evaluate as well create both in scientific theory and at the time their daily life. A review is conducted on the state-of-the-art methods using the preferred reporting items for reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guideline. We review literature from several publications and analyze STEM approach is a very appropriate approach to use in 21st century learning. After applying STEM approach, students are expected to be able mastering scientific and technological literacy. In learning there is a process of interaction between educators and students and learning resources in a learning environment to achieve learning goals. Learning is done using learning strategies in facilitating the teaching and learning process. So that the process can be carried out properly and conveyed correctly, STEM learning is carried out which can integrate knowledge, skills and values of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to be able to solve a problem related to learning in the context of everyday life.
... Mathematics education researchers generally concur that paying attention to, interpreting, and responding to students' thinking is essential as a part of effective instructional processes supporting students' learning (Luna & Selmer, 2021). For this reason, researchers have conducted various studies of mathematics teachers' and prospective teachers' student thinking noticing ability, level of noticing, and how this ability can be improved (Fernández et al., 2013;Krupa et al., 2017;Özdemir Baki & Işık, 2018;Tataroğlu Taşdan, 2021;Türker Biber & Yetkin Özdemir, 2021;van Es & Sherin, 2002). ...
In this study, we investigated mathematics teacher’s noticing of students’ thinking in the context of mathematical modeling activities (MEAs) related to statistics. One middle-school mathematics teacher participated in the study, which adopted a case study design. Data were collected through interviews with the teacher based on video recordings of students’ group work, the written works of the students, and the researchers’ observations and field notes. As students evolved from first-draft solutions to more powerful, sharable ways of thinking about the modeling activity, the teacher focused on student thinking related to four distinct aspects of the overall modeling activities: understanding the problem, manipulation, interpretation, and verification. She mostly focused on procedural aspects of students’ thinking during the manipulation step. Her attention and interpretation of the manipulation step focused on the students’ (a) identification of the solution (how students reach the solution), (b) reasons why they selected these solutions (explanations and justifications of the solutions), and (c) features of the solutions they used. The teacher also noticed how the students’ performances depended on the structure of the activity (whether a data set was given). She pointed out that MEAs support students’ engagement, conceptual understanding, skills related to statistics, and ability to use data processing concepts in their daily lives.
... The skills of attending, interpreting, and responding to students' thoughts have been the focus of educational research. Those three skills are vital learning components to support students' learning so that the effort to comprehend and develop them becomes one of the focuses of mathematics learning (Luna & Selmer, 2021). Those essential skills need to be developed during teacher instructional reasoning about the interpretation of students' thinking used by teachers: (a) making connections between certain moments of student thinking, (b) considering the relationship between students' mathematical thinking and the structure of mathematical tasks, and (c) develop students' thinking tests. ...
This study aimed to explore the mathematics teachers' skills in attending, interpreting, and responding to students' mathematical creative thinking. The data of this study comprised of the teachers' skills in attending, interpreting, and responding to students' mathematical creative thinking gained from observing a recorded video of the teachers' teaching enactment. The data were collected inductively with open coding to examine classroom teaching. Findings suggest that the mathematics teachers raise the attending skills in two categories: activities directly related to students' mathematical creative thinking and activities that support students' mathematical creative thinking. They interpret mathematical understanding in various ways: excluding the justification of right or wrong answers; focusing on right or wrong; focusing on the only correct solution; focusing on deficiencies in the student's working process; focusing on how they wrote and drew on grid paper and anything else indirectly connected to mathematical thinking; stating that working on the problem is easy; comparing the thinking process of the teachers and students. The mathematics teachers responded by giving comments or questions about their students' knowledge, idea, procedure, or mathematical thinking and based on mathematical creative thinking; giving general comments or questions; giving comments or questions to trigger students to share their opinions; asking other students to comment or ask questions about certain students' thinking ideas; asking other students to explain certain students' thoughts; giving comments or questions about students' mathematical creative thinking/open-ended problem/critical thinking.
... Researchers also suggest that there are components embedded within professional noticing skills. For example, Luna and Selmer [31] examined the skill of deciding how to respond and identified the components of time, focus, and action. In this study, we examine expert teacher instructional reasoning when their deciding actions and purposes align with responsive teaching practices. ...
This study examines instructional reasoning in an approximation of practice that simulates a teacher sitting down after class to examine students’ written work. The participants were prompted to attend to, interpret, and decide how to respond to student thinking contained in a piece of written work. Our purpose was to capture the additional cognitive work that teachers engage in. Using qualitative content analysis, we identified the most frequent types of instructional reasoning used by expert teachers just prior to engaging in a responsive deciding action about how to respond. We used the results of our analysis to present three illustrative cases of responsive instructional reasoning.
... The purpose of developing PSTs' noticing of student ideas is so they will then respond to what they notice in ways that advance students' understanding of science concepts and practices . However, studies that look specifically at responding in relation to noticing indicate that although notable progress can be made in supporting sophisticated noticing, responding to what one notices is very challenging for PSTs (Barnhart & van Es, 2015;Luna & Selmer, 2021;Schäfer & Seidel, 2015). Making in-the-moment decisions about what to do with students' ideas is highly contextual and is often subject to competing instructional priorities . ...
The use of video to support preservice teacher development is becoming increasingly common. However, research on teacher noticing indicates that novices need tools to focus their attention on students' disciplinary ideas. This article describes a course designed for secondary science teachers that incorporates video analysis as a core part of repeated learning cycles. Of particular interest is how well the video-analysis tasks and tools support PSTs in learning to plan, enact, analyze, and reflect on instruction. A qualitative analysis of PSTs' video annotations, lesson-analysis guides, and written reflections reveals that PSTs in the course developed a disposition towards responsive instruction and leveraged evidence of student thinking in their analyses of the effectiveness of their instruction. Lesson-analysis guides appear to be the tool PSTs relied on the most to inform their written reflections. Further investigation on how best to structure video analysis will help further refine the use of video in teacher education.
There has been a proliferation of qualitative approaches to researching education. While this has resulted in the construction of a rich tapestry of knowledge about education, it has also resulted in disparate research ideas, processes and practices, and created tensions relating to what constitutes rigorous qualitative research in education. As such, the aim of this paper was to use a multidisciplinary perspective and draw on concepts and practices relating to research coherence, reflexivity, transparency, authenticity, sincerity, credibility and ethics to (1) problematise traditional approaches to rigour in qualitative education research and (2) support those who do interpretive qualitative education research to select and embed relevant concepts and practices to increase and evidence the rigour of their work. I end this paper with an attempt to galvanise interpretive qualitative researchers in education to reflexively consider and justify the ways and extent to which their research decisions, processes and practices are rigorous.
The study investigated the impact of pedagogies of practice approach on pre-service teachers’ professional noticing skills in perimeter and area measurement concepts. Thirty-two pre-service teachers engaged in a video-based module situated in pedagogies of practice framework, and the analysis of three pre-service teachers was provided for in-depth exploration. The findings showed that there was mostly an increase in the level of evidence provided by the pre-service teachers at the end of the sessions. More specifically, two pre-service teachers who initially had weaker skills in attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond when decomposing the video clips individually in the first session improved their skills in the third session. In addition, learning to professionally notice students’ mathematical thinking in perimeter and area measurement in the decomposition of the represented practice assisted pre-service teachers in attending and interpreting the students’ thinking and deciding on instructional actions in the approximation of practice. In this way, all three pre-service teachers provided robust levels of evidence for the noticing prompts in the approximation of practice. Our findings suggest integrating pedagogies of practice in pre-service teacher education since it nurtures the development of pre-service teachers’ professional noticing skills.
Instructional shifts required by equitable, reform‐based science instruction are challenging, especially in the elementary context. Such shifts require professional development (PD) that supports teacher internalization of new pedagogical strategies as well as changes in beliefs about how students learn. Because of this complexity, many PD programs struggle to foster lasting pedagogical shifts, necessitating further investigation into why some teachers successfully embrace reform practices while others do not. This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary teachers in science PD differentially make sense of and internalize new pedagogies. Findings indicate that teachers most likely to adopt reform‐based instructional practices from the PD were those who clearly connected student learning to their instructional moves. In addition, teachers who more actively attended to student sensemaking and productive struggle took up pedagogies from the PD more substantively than did colleagues who attended solely to student engagement and affect. Finally, teachers who attended to and valued novel ideas from students’ lived experiences were more likely to change their beliefs about students’ capacity to learn science, and thus more likely to see the value of instructional practices from the PD. In sum, structuring PD to build on these specific teacher noticing skills can encourage more teachers to move away from traditional, teacher‐directed instructional practice, and more fully support reform‐based instructional practices.
The work of teaching includes many in-the-moment decisions for teachers to make. In this study, we focused on the decisions prospective teachers made within the elementary context specific to shared teaching practice in mathematics and science instruction – elicit and use evidence of student thinking. Within a qualitative multisite case study, we analyzed data for how PTs took up student thinking within instructional decisions, and the nature of responsive moves enacted within an animated context once student thinking had been elicited. Findings reveal PTs were responsive to elicited student thinking. Most commonly, PTs’ instructional decisions involved asking additional questions or inviting students to test their ideas. However, PTs’ pedagogical moves varied across mathematics and science disciplines. Our findings guide teacher educators to focus on what moves best support PTs’ development to use evidence of student thinking across disciplines in the elementary classroom. The consistency of asking questions within mathematics and science begins to inform the quest for shared core practices. Results highlight the benefit of using technology (i.e. animations) as a tool to support PTs’ learning of instructional decisions and pedagogical moves to uncover the nuances of the teaching practice elicit and use evidence of student thinking.
The study reported on here focused on pre-service teachers noticing learner thinking in the context of written work. The results show how pre-service teachers engaged in noticing learner thinking and on which aspects of learner thinking they focused. These results and related discussion broaden our conceptualisation of teacher noticing learner thinking as involving both disciplinary and non-disciplinary-specific aspects and provides related pedagogical implications for those who educate teachers.
Teachers' use of formative assessment (FA) has been shown to improve student outcomes; however, teachers enact FA in many ways. We examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers. We developed a coding scheme through a validation‐in‐use approach to characterize teachers' practices using three streams of data that included teachers' self‐interviews about the purposes and outcomes of their FAs, our analysis of their noticing/interpreting and acting, and their comments on intentions behind the teaching acts they considered significant. In contrast to cycles of eliciting‐noticing‐interpreting‐acting, we found noticing/interpreting to be central to FA enactment, driving teachers' eliciting or advancing acts. We characterized ways of noticing/interpreting as more authoritative or dialogic and observed that eliciting acts and advancing acts occurred along a similar range. Teachers' in‐the‐moment purposes and larger learning goals were synthesized as they made choices about teaching acts. The model is framed in terms of utility to teachers to examine their own FA practices, with the aim of becoming better equipped to strategically enact FA in intentional ways to achieve their purposes.
This mixed methods study investigates the ways in which secondary mathematics prospective teachers acquire skills needed to attend to, interpret, and respond to students’ mathematical thinking and the ways in which their perceived strengths and weaknesses influence their skills when this type of formalized training is not part of their program. These skills (attending, interpreting, and responding) are defined as teachers’ professional noticing of students’ thinking. Results indicate that seniors respond to students’ thinking in significantly different ways from juniors and sophomores. Converging the data highlighted inconsistencies in how participants’ were making sense of students’ mathematical thinking, as well as in participants’ self-identified strengths and weaknesses.
Early career teachers rarely receive sustained support for addressing issues of diversity and equity in their science teaching. This paper reports on design research to create a 30 hour professional development seminar focused on cultivating the interpretive power of early career teachers who teach science to students from historically non-dominant communities. Interpretive power refers to teachers’ attunement to (a) students’ diverse sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in science and (b) expansive pedagogical practices that encourage, make visible, and intentionally build on students’ ideas, experiences, and perspectives on scientific phenomena. The seminar sought to integrate student sense-making, scientific subject matter, teaching practice, and matters of equity and diversity on the same plane of professional inquiry by engaging participants in: (a) learning plant science; (b) analyzing classroom cases; (c) experimenting with expansive discourse practices in their classrooms; and (d) analyzing their classroom experiments in relation to student sense-making and expansive pedagogy. Twenty-eight teachers participated in two cycles of design research. An interview-based transcript analysis task captured shifts in teachers’ interpretive power through their participation in the seminar. Findings showed that the teachers developed greater attunement to: complexity in students’ scientific ideas; the intellectual generativity of students’ sense-making; student talk as evidence of in-process, emergent thinking; and co-construction of meaning in classroom discussions. Findings also showed that participants developed deeper understanding of the functions of expansive teaching practices in fostering student sense-making in science and greater commitment to engaging in expansive practices in their classroom science discussions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach XX:XX-XX, 2015.
The construct professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking is introduced as a way to begin to unpack the in-the-moment decision making that is foundational to the complex view of teaching endorsed in national reform documents. We define this expertise as a set of interrelated skills including (a) attending to children's strategies, (b) interpreting children's understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond on the basis of children's understandings. This construct was assessed in a cross-sectional study of 131 prospective and practicing teachers, differing in the amount of experience they had with children's mathematical thinking. The findings help to characterize what this expertise entails; provide snapshots of those with varied levels of expertise; and document that, given time, this expertise can be learned.
With the goal of helping teacher candidates become well-started beginners, it is important that methods courses in teacher education programs focus on high-leverage practices. Using responsive teaching practices, specifically eliciting, identifying, interpreting, and responding to students’ science ideas (i.e., formative assessment), can be used to support all students in learning science successfully. This study follows seven secondary science teacher candidates in a yearlong practice-based methods course. Course assignments (i.e., plans for and reflections on teaching) as well as teaching videos were analyzed using a recursive qualitative approach. In this paper, we present themes and patterns in teacher candidates’ abilities to elicit, identify, interpret, and respond to students’ ideas. Specifically, we found that those teacher candidates who grew in the ways in which they elicited students’ ideas from fall to spring were also those who were able to adopt a more balanced reflection approach (considering both teacher and student moves). However, we found that even the teacher candidates who grew in these practices did not move toward seeing students’ ideas as nuanced; rather, they saw students’ ideas in a dichotomous fashion: right or wrong. We discuss implications for teacher preparation, specifically for how to promote productive reflection and tools for better understanding students’ ideas.
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 sense do they make of it? This groundbreaking collection begins with an overview of the construct of noticing and the various historical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on teacher noticing. It then focuses on studies of mathematics teacher noticing in the context of teaching and learning and concludes by suggesting links to other constructs integral to teaching. By collecting the work of leaders in the field in one volume, the editors present the current state of research and provide ideas for how future work could further the field.
This study investigates pre-service teachers' capacities to attend to, analyze, and respond to student thinking. Using a performance assessment of teacher competence, we compare two cohorts of science teacher candidates, one that participated in a video-based course designed to develop these skills and one that did not. Course participants demonstrate more sophisticated levels of attention to and analysis of student ideas. Analysis of the relationship among skills reveals that sophisticated analyses and responses to student ideas require high sophistication in attending to student ideas. However, high sophistication in attending to student ideas does not guarantee more sophisticated analyses or responses.
Stage-based views of teacher development hold that novice teachers are unable to attend to students' thinking until they have begun to identify themselves as teachers and mastered classroom routines, and so the first emphases in learning to teach should be on forming routines and identity. The authors challenge those views, as others have done, with evidence of novices attending to students' thinking early in their teaching and offer framing as an alternative perspective on whether and how teachers attend to student thinking. By this account, most teachers work in professional contexts that focus their attention on curriculum, classroom routines, and their own behavior, rather than on student thinking. An account of framing suggests an early, strong emphasis on attention to student thinking in teacher education.
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 the thinking. Twenty-six video clips were rated as being low, medium, or high on each dimension. Corresponding teacher discussions of each video were then examined to identify the ways in which clip dimensions served as catalysts for more and less productive teacher conversations of student mathematical thinking. Findings include first, that, under certain circumstances, both low-and high-depth clips lead to productive discussions. Second, high-depth clips in which student thinking is sustained only briefly do not typically lead to productive discussions. Third, in cases where windows and depth are both high, clips that are either low or high in clarity resulted in productive conversations of student thinking on the part of teachers.
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 study is based on data from two year-long video clubs in which teachers met monthly to watch and discuss video excerpts from each others' classrooms. Participating in a video club was found to influence the teachers'professional vision as exhibited in the video club meetings, in interviews outside of the video club meetings, and in the teachers'instructional practices. These results suggest that profes- sional vision is a productive lens for investigating teacher learning via video. In addition, this article illustrates that video clubs have the potential to support teacher learning in ways that extend beyond the boundaries of the video club meetings themselves.
To better understand how teachers can capitalize on the power of story problems, Jacobs and Ambrose analyzed teacher-student conversations in problem-solving interviews. They identified eight categories of teacher moves that, when timed properly, were productive in advancing mathematical conversations. (Contains 2 tables.)
This article is a review of the literature on classroom formative assessment. Several studies show firm evidence that innovations designed to strengthen the frequent feedback that students receive about their learning yield substantial learning gains. The perceptions of students and their role in self‐assessment are considered alongside analysis of the strategies used by teachers and the formative strategies incorporated in such systemic approaches as mastery learning. There follows a more detailed and theoretical analysis of the nature of feedback, which provides a basis for a discussion of the development of theoretical models for formative assessment and of the prospects for the improvement of practice.
We raise concerns about the current state of research and development in formative assessment, specifically to argue that in its concentration on strategies for the teacher, the literature overlooks the disciplinary substance of what teachers and students assess. Our argument requires analysis of specific instances in the literature, and so we have selected four prominent publications for consideration as examples. These, we show, pay little attention to the student reasoning they depict, presume traditional notions of “content” as correct information, and treat assessment as distinct from other activities of learning and teaching, even when they claim the contrary. We then offer an alternative image of formative assessment centered on attention to disciplinary substance, which we illustrate with an example from a high school biology class. Assessment, we contend, should be understood and presented as genuine engagement with ideas, continuous with the disciplinary practices science teaching should be working to cultivate. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1109–1136, 2011
This paper covers six interrelated issues in formative assessment (aka, ‘assessment for learning’). The issues concern the definition of formative assessment, the claims commonly made for its effectiveness, the limited attention given to domain considerations in its conceptualisation, the under‐representation of measurement principles in that conceptualisation, the teacher‐support demands formative assessment entails, and the impact of the larger educational system. The paper concludes that the term, ‘formative assessment’, does not yet represent a well‐defined set of artefacts or practices. Although research suggests that the general practices associated with formative assessment can facilitate learning, existing definitions admit such a wide variety of implementations that effects should be expected to vary widely from one implementation and student population to the next. In addition, the magnitude of commonly made quantitative claims for effectiveness is suspect, deriving from untraceable, flawed, dated, or unpublished sources. To realise maximum benefit from formative assessment, new development should focus on conceptualising well‐specified approaches built around process and methodology rooted within specific content domains. Those conceptualisations should incorporate fundamental measurement principles that encourage teachers and students to recognise the inferential nature of assessment. The conceptualisations should also allow for the substantial time and professional support needed if the vast majority of teachers are to become proficient users of formative assessment. Finally, for greatest benefit, formative approaches should be conceptualised as part of a comprehensive system in which all components work together to facilitate learning.
The findings reported on in this manuscript emerged from a design experiment conducted at a low-income urban middle school intended to support the teacher in incorporating pedagogical practices supportive of students' everyday knowledge and practices during a 6th grade unit on food and nutrition from the LiFE curriculum. In studying the impact of the design experiment we noticed qualitative shifts in classroom Discourse marked by a changing role and understandings of the funds of knowledge students brought to science learning. Using qualitative data and grounded theory we present an analysis of the different types of funds of knowledge and Discourse that students brought into science class. We focus on how the students' strategic use of these funds augmented the learning experience of the students and the learning community as well as the learning outcomes. We discuss the implications these funds of knowledge and Discourses had on the development of three related third space transformations: physical, political, and pedagogical. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 50–73, 2009
Whilst many definitions of formative assessment have been offered, there is no clear rationale to define and delimit it within
broader theories of pedagogy. This paper aims to offer such a rationale, within a framework which can also unify the diverse
set of practices which have been described as formative. The analysis is used to relate formative assessment both to other
pedagogic initiatives, notably cognitive acceleration and dynamic assessment, and to some of the existing literature on models
of self-regulated learning and on classroom discourse. This framework should indicate potentially fruitful lines for further
enquiry, whilst at the same time opening up new ways of helping teachers to implement formative practices more effectively.
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’ self-reports of the
effects of the video club, and (c) teachers’ instruction across the year. Data analysis revealed changes in all three contexts.
In the video-club meetings, teachers paid increased attention to student mathematical thinking over the course of the year.
In interviews, teachers reported having learned about students’ mathematical thinking, about the importance of attending to
student ideas during instruction, and about their school’s mathematics curriculum. Finally, shifts were also uncovered in
the teachers’ instruction. By the end of the year, teachers increasingly made space for student thinking to emerge in the
classroom, probed students’ underlying understandings, and learned from their students while teaching.
KeywordsMathematics teaching-Professional development-Teacher learning-Video-based professional development
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 the video clubs shifted from a primary focus on the teacher to increased attention to students’ actions and ideas. In addition, discussions of student thinking moved from simple restatements of students’ ideas to detailed analyses of student thinking. Furthermore, teachers began to reframe their discussions of pedagogical issues in terms of student thinking.
Efforts toward improving K-12 science education emphasize teachers noticing students’ thinking as they engage in disciplinary practices and reasoning. This noticing requires specialized teacher knowledge and skills as it involves attending to students’ ideas, as well as making sense of and responding to those ideas so that the disciplinary substance in them is recognized, made explicit, and supported. This study investigates three elementary teachers’ in-the-moment noticing of students’ ideas while teaching science and their thinking about what it means to engage in this teaching practice. Results indicate that teachers notice many different kinds of student science ideas, and also that teachers have different ways of thinking about which student ideas are substantive during a science lesson. This research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the nature of teacher noticing in science. Noticing students’ science ideas involves not only the presence of ideas and the ability to notice them, but also a teacher’s understanding of this teaching practice in the moment.
Scholarly calls to reform science education for all students emphasize scientific sense-making. Despite the importance of sense-making, few strategies exist to help novice teachers learn to notice and respond equitably to students’ scientific sense-making in elementary science. In this article, we report on a qualitative case study in which we investigated sense-making moments that occurred when novice teachers facilitated classroom discussions. Findings suggest that when novice teachers made space in class discussions for sense-making—for example, by trying different responses to clarify student ideas or waiting before responding to figure out next steps—this expanded opportunities for shared epistemic authority; however, novices did not often recognize these moments as productive for sense-making. Findings also suggest that novice teachers may benefit from support to help them develop their abilities to notice, interpret, and respond equitably to students’ scientific sense-making in class discussions.
Building on the work of teacher noticing, this study investigated teachers’ noticing of students’ thinking evident in artifacts from their science teaching context. Prior work on teachers’ noticing in science has generally focused on noticing students’ thinking surrounding specific disciplinary content. We asked 20 elementary teachers to identify and discuss an artifact that represented their students’ thinking in science. Rather than discuss specific disciplinary content, teachers described what students were “doing” in producing that artifact. The results of this study demonstrate attending to what students are doing is one way teachers notice students’ thinking in science, and in these descriptions of “doing” lie important connections to the scientific and engineering practices of the Next Generation Science Standards. This study can inform the design of teacher learning experiences in which artifacts and teachers’ tendency to focus on what students are doing can be leveraged toward learning to notice students’ thinking in science.
This book reflects on the continuing development of teacher noticing through an exploration of the latest research. The authors and editors seek to clarify the construct of teacher noticing and its related branches and respond to challenges brought forth in earlier research. The authors also investigate teacher noticing in multiple contexts and frameworks, including mathematics, science, international venues, and various age groups.
Learning progressions—particularly as defined and operationalized in science education—have significant potential to inform teachers’ formative assessment practices. In this overview article, I lay out the argument for this potential, starting from definitions for “formative assessment practices” and “learning progressions” (both in science education and more subject-general literature). By aligning the challenges that teachers face in enacting formative assessment practices with the affordances of learning progressions, I explain how learning progressions may support these practices. Finally, I preview how the articles in the special issue address this hypothesis.
Teaching is a complex endeavor that necessarily requires teachers to attend to some activities and ignore others. This case study focuses on prospective teachers’ learning to notice student mathematical thinking. We frame our view of noticing with the professional noticing framework (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, in Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 41:169–202, 2010), and our view of student mathematical thinking with the MOST analytical framework (Leatham, Peterson, Stockero, & Van Zoest, in Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 46:88–124, 2015). We share evidence that a research experience that focused prospective teachers in a sustained, intense experience focused on articulating student mathematical thinking through focused video analysis influenced their ability to notice in-the-moment student mathematical thinking during their student teaching experience.
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 supporting mathematics teachers. Results indicate that the current design supported science teachers in noticing and discussing students' thinking in sustained and meaningful ways.
In this article, we provide brief overviews of the definitions of formative and summative assessment and a few examples of types of formative and summative assessments that can be used in classroom contexts. We highlight the points that these two types of assessment are complementary and the differences between them are often in the way these assessments are used. We also list several resources that may be useful for teachers who wish to know more about using formative and summative assessments in their classrooms.
This case study contributes to efforts to characterize teaching that is responsive to children’s mathematical thinking. We conceptualize responsive teaching as a type of teaching in which teachers’ instructional decisions about what to pursue and how to pursue it are continually adjusted during instruction in response to children’s content-specific thinking, instead of being determined in advance. Building on earlier work, we present an emerging framework of teaching moves using examples from the interactions of a highly skilled teacher who was selected because of her expertise in responsive teaching. We draw from her interactions with children around fraction story problems in both one-on-one interviews and class lessons. The framework identifies categories
of teaching moves, rather than specific comments or questions, because how teachers enact a category depends on the situation. We discuss four major categories of teaching moves: (a) ensuring the child is making sense of the story problem, (b) exploring details of the child’s existing strategy, (c) encouraging the child to consider other strategies, and (d) connecting the child’s thinking to symbolic notation. Our findings also highlight both the potential usefulness of one-on-one interviews for professional developers and researchers and the need for increased attention to the part of class lessons in which teachers circulate and engage in one-on-one conversations with children.
A teacher's ability to attend and respond to student thinking is a key instructional capacity for promoting complex and deeper learning in science classrooms. This qualitative multiple case study examines 14 preservice science teachers' (PSTs) responses to learning opportunities created to develop this capacity, as provided by a teacher preparation program. The PSTs engaged in multiple cycles of designing assessments and analyzing student work in coordination with clinical experiences in the field. Drawing upon the notions of responsiveness and noticing, we analyze teaching episodes for whether and how the PSTs in this study attended and responded to student thinking in instructional contexts. Several teaching episodes provide evidence of PSTs' productive responsiveness—suggesting modification in specific elements of instructional design to create better conditions for advancing students' scientific thinking. In general, however, the episodes suggest uneven success in PSTs' responses to student thinking. The findings point to two considerations in designing learning opportunities to enhance PSTs' responsiveness: (a) the use of high-quality assessment tasks that make student thinking visible and (b) helping PSTs to reframe the problems by deprivatizing PSTs' interpretations of student responses.
The goal of this exploratory study was to analyze how beginning prospective secondary school teachers approached the analysis of student written responses to formative assessment probes. We sought to identify what elements of students' written work were noticed, what types of inferences of student understanding were built, and what these noticed elements and inferences told us about levels of sophistication in assessing student understanding. Our results are based on the qualitative analysis of the written evaluations of student work made by 32 prospective secondary school teachers enrolled in an introductory teacher preparation course at our institution. The results of this study suggest that analyzing teachers' assessment of student understanding requires paying attention to both domain-neutral and domain-dependent aspects of teacher reasoning. Domain-neutral dimensions help characterize how a teacher frames the assessment of student understanding. Domain-dependent dimensions characterize how the teacher attends to relevant disciplinary ideas. Our prospective teachers often focused on the description and qualification of student work, making fewer attempts to make sense of student ideas. However, study participants' abilities to generate inferences were varied and influenced by the nature of students' responses. Findings from this study provide a framework for scaffolding and evaluating progress in teachers' abilities to notice and interpret student work. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach
Background/Context
This study investigates how people are prepared for professional practice in the clergy, teaching, and clinical psychology. The work is located within research on professional education, and research on the teaching and learning of practice.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
The purpose of the study is to develop a framework to describe and analyze the teaching of practice in professional education programs, specifically preparation for relational practices.
Setting
The research took place in eight professional education programs located in seminaries, schools of professional psychology, and universities across the country.
Population/Participants/Subjects
Our research participants include faculty members, students, and administrators at each of these eight programs.
Research Design
This research is a comparative case study of professional education across three different professions—the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. Our data include qualitative case studies of eight preparation programs: two teacher education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology programs.
Data Collection and Analysis
For each institution, we conducted site visits that included interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff; observations of multiple classes and field-work; and focus groups with students who were either at the midpoint or at the end of their programs.
Conclusions/Recommendations
We have identified three key concepts for understanding the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decomposition, and approximations of practice. Representations of practice comprise the different ways that practice is represented in professional education and what these various representations make visible to novices. Decomposition of practice involves breaking down practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. Approximations of practice refer to opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession. In this article, we define and provide examples of the representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice from our study of professional education in the clergy, clinical psychology, and teaching. We conclude that, in the program we studied, prospective teachers have fewer opportunities to engage in approximations that focus on contingent, interactive practice than do novices in the other two professions we studied.
Learning progressions, or sequences of how ideas and practices develop within domains, are increasingly a focus of science education research. Recently, researchers have called for these progressions to be used as interpretive frameworks for teachers' instructional planning and assessment practices. In this study, we explore data from two high schools collected in two studies. In the first study, we engaged with teachers to develop and refine a learning progression for natural selection alongside formative assessments. In the second study, we took this learning progression to teachers at a different school, and used it to co-develop formative assessments and plan units. We adopt a communities of practice perspective to frame two case studies of these schools, taking the learning progression as a boundary object that not only maintained its meaning across the two different communities, but also took up different meanings within each community. We found that the learning community that helped to develop the learning progression used it as an opportunity to bring previously disparate units into sync, and to develop and enact a common sequence of formative assessments within their unit. In contrast, at the second school, teachers struggled to make sense of the learning progression within the accountability context of their school, as well as other tools provided them by the school and district. These results indicate that teachers could potentially benefit from the opportunity to co-develop learning progressions with researchers that capture their ideas that are shared within the community; however, if learning progressions are not in sync with other tools provided to teachers to structure their planning, they will not be taken up in the same way. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach
Recent calls for teacher preparation to become more grounded in practice prompt the questions: Which practices? and perhaps more fundamentally, what counts as a model of instruction worth learning for a new professional—i.e., the beginner's repertoire? In this report, we argue the following: If a defined set of subject-specific high-leverage practices could be articulated and taught during teacher preparation and induction, the broader teacher education community could collectively refine these practices as well as the tools and other resources that support their appropriation by novices across various learning-to-teach contexts. To anchor our conversation about these issues, we describe the evolution, in design, and enactment, of a “candidate core” and a suite of tools that supported the approximation of equitable and rigorous pedagogy for several groups of beginning science teachers. Their struggles and successes in taking up ambitious practice informed not only our designs for a beginner's repertoire but also a system of tools and socioprofessional routines that could foster such teaching over time. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:878–903, 2012
This study explores the nature of teacher learning within the broader context of increasing state-level accountability, applying Levi-Strauss' bricolage metaphor to teachers' workplace learning. Based on the assumption that "problems of practice" serve as catalysts for learning, it addresses how teachers define and solve problems in their work (i.e., what resources and strategies are employed and why). The study examines data from three high schools that participated in an exploration of teacher workplace learning. Data were collected over 2 years from teacher interviews, observations, and focus groups. The relationship between teacher work context and challenges was evident at each school. As the context varied, so too did problems encountered, though problems differed more in degree than type. Two aspects of the teacher-student relationship shaped teachers' work context: the challenge of engaging students with the content regardless of students' interests and backgrounds and balancing student engagement and student control. The manner in which teaches addressed challenges suggested that in many ways they did work as bricoleurs. Most challenges were dealt with in the moment, requiring reflection-in-action. Teachers were multifaceted learners and problems solvers, often drawing from multiple learning experiences to resolve challenges. Teachers engaged in learning activities that helped them theoretically frame the challenges they faced. (Contains 11 references.) (SM)
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 teachers learned to notice students’ mathematical thinking in this context: Direct, Cyclical, and Incremental. Finally, we explore ways the video club context influenced teacher learning. Understanding different forms of teacher learning provides insight for research on teacher cognition and may inform the design of video-based professional development.
With growing interest in the role of teachers as the key mediators between educational policies and outcomes, the importance of developing good measures of classroom processes has become increasingly apparent. Yet, collecting reliable and valid information about a construct as complex as instruction poses important conceptual and technical challenges. This article summarizes the results of two studies that investigated the properties of measures of instruction based on a teacher-generated instrument (the Scoop Notebook) that combines features of portfolios and self-report. Classroom artifacts and teacher reflections were collected from samples of middle school science classrooms and rated along 10 dimensions of science instruction derived from the National Science Education Standards; ratings based on direct classroom observations were used as comparison. The results suggest that instruments that combine artifacts and self-reports hold promise for measuring science instruction with reliability similar to, and sizeable correlations with, measures based on classroom observation. We discuss the implications and lessons learned from this work for the conceptualization, design, and use of artifact-based instruments for measuring instructional practice in different contexts and for different purposes. Artifact-based instruments may illuminate features of instruction not apparent even through direct classroom observation; moreover, the process of structured collection and reflection on artifacts may have value for professional development. However, their potential value and applicability on a larger scale depends on careful consideration of the match between the instrument and the model of instruction, the intended uses of the measures, and the aspects of classroom practice most amenable to reliable scoring through artifacts. We outline a research agenda for addressing unresolved questions and advancing theoretical and practical knowledge around the measurement of instructional practice. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 38–67, 2012
This study explores teachers' informal formative assessment practices in three middle school science classrooms. We present a model for examining these practices based on three components of formative assessment (eliciting, recognizing, and using information) and the three domains linked to scientific inquiry (epistemic frameworks, conceptual structures, and social processes). We describe the informal assessment practices as ESRU cycles—the teacher Elicits a question; the Student responds; the teacher Recognizes the student's response; and then Uses the information collected to support student learning. By tracking the strategies teachers used in terms of ESRU cycles, we were able to capture differences in assessment practices across the three teachers during the implementation of four investigations of a physical science unit on buoyancy. Furthermore, based on information collected in a three-question embedded assessment administered to assess students' learning, we linked students' level of performance to the teachers' informal assessment practices. We found that the teacher who more frequently used complete ESRU cycles had students with higher performance on the embedded assessment as compared with the other two teachers. We conclude that the ESRU model is a useful way of capturing differences in teachers' informal assessment practices. Furthermore, the study suggests that effective informal formative assessment practices may be associated with student learning in scientific inquiry classrooms. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach
This study investigated interactions between pedagogical documentation—a formative assessment technique and instructional intervention designed to increase student learning by recording children’s experiences—and kindergarten children, families and teachers in the UAE. The study sample comprised six teachers in six kindergarten classrooms, 141 kindergarten children and 67 parents. The major data-gathering techniques were participant observation, semi-structured individual interviews, focus group interviews and parent questionnaire. The results revealed that pedagogical documentation has the potential to improve children’s learning, contribute to teachers’ awareness of learning processes and help parents gain a better understanding of learning processes in their children’s education.
Reflections on the study of teacher noticing
- B Sherin
- J Star
A framework for learning to notice student thinking
- E Van Es
Four pillars of effective university-school district partnerships: Implications for educational planning
- S Myran
- K Crum
- J Clayton
Case study research: Design and methods
- R Yin
Using classroom artifacts to focus teachers’ noticing: Affordances and opportunities
- L Goldsmith
- N Seago
Sense-making moments: Elementary teachers’ responsiveness towards disciplinary and equitable aspects of scientific sense-making
- C Schwarz
- M Braaten
- C Haverly
- A Calabrese-Barton
- E De Los Santos