Content uploaded by Miriam Sherin
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Miriam Sherin on Jan 12, 2025
Content may be subject to copyright.
DIGITAL VIDEO FOR
TEACHER EDUCATION
Research and Practice
Edited by
Brendan Calandra,
Georgia State University
Peter Rich, Brigham Young University
First published 2015
ISBN: 978-0-415-70625-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 0-415-70626-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-87171-4 (ebk)
1
TEACHER NOTICING VIA VIDEO
The Role of Interpretive Frames
Miriam Gamoran Sherin & Rosemary S. Russ
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
DOI: 10.4324/9781315871714-
This research was supported by the Nationa l Science Foundation under Gra nt Nos.
0133900. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily
reect the views of the supporting agency.
NEW YORK AND LONDON
2
1
TEACHER NOTICING VIA VIDEO
The Role of Interpretive Frames
Miriam Gamoran Sherin & Rosemary S. Russ
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON
Introduction
Over the past decade, educational researchers have increasingly explored the con-
struct of teacher noticing by documenting its role in teaching expertise. Teachers
are faced with a “blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory data” (Sherin & Star,
2011, p. 69), too much for any one person to process at once. Therefore, teachers
must select, either tacitly or explicitly, some elements from the environment to
attend to while leaving other elements aside (Miller, 2011). Research indicates
that noticing is consequential for teaching; when teachers pay close attention to
the details of their students’ thinking, there are increased opportunities for student
learning (Russ & Sherin, 2013).
The importance of teacher noticing has led to a proliferation of programs
designed to tune teachers’ attention to classroom interactions in particular ways.
Within these programs, video is a key resource for successfully supporting the
development of noticing (Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008). While
video captures much of the richness of the classroom environment, it does not
require an immediate response from a teacher and can instead promote sus-
tained teacher reection (Sherin, 2004). Moreover, because video provides a
permanent record of classroom interactions, it can be viewed repeatedly and
with dierent lenses in mind, promoting new ways for teachers to “see” what
is taking place.
Research on teacher noticing has thus far reached some points of consen-
sus: (1) teachers do notice some things in the classroom while overlooking
other things, and (2) teacher noticing is not merely a series of isolated events
that occur consecutively in time or space. Instead, teacher noticing is con-
textual and interdependent. Specically, teachers do not notice one event or
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
DOI: 10.4324/9781315871714-2
4 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
action and then a moment later notice another event, independent of what
he or she has already noticed. Instead, what a teacher notices in one moment
drives, at least in part, what the teacher notices next. Moreover, as with per-
ception in general, noticing can occur in both a top-down and a bottom-up
fashion. Rumelhart (1980) describes top-down activation through the exam-
ple of recognizing a face, which then prompts one to identify the nose, ears,
eyes, etc., in contrast to bottom-up activation, in which one might initially
notice a “nose” and assume that it belongs to a face, which then prompts one
to be on the lookout for the related elements of a face. For teachers, percep-
tion likely happens in a similar way. In some instances, noticing an unexpected
student error might prompt a teacher to look for information about why that
error arose (bottom-up). In other cases, a teacher might decide in advance
to look for dierent strategies students use to solve addition word problems
(top-down).
What is missing from the literature, however, is a sense of the kinds of
structures that drive and give rise to this contextuality and interdependence.
That is, we do not have an analog to the “face” schema for teaching. In this
chapter, we ask: What frames or schemas do teachers typically draw on in
making sense of classroom interactions? To address this question, we introduce
13 interpretive frames that we have identied in our data and explore the rela-
tionship between the frames and teachers’ experiences viewing and discussing
video excerpts.
The notion of interpretive frames is important both for understanding the
nature of teacher noticing, as we have outlined above, as well as for the design
of teacher education and professional development opportunities. Under-
standing the ways in which teachers make sense of what they notice provides
useful starting points for supporting the development of teachers’ noticing.
Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing
We take a particular approach to the study of teacher noticing that focuses on the
construct of “teachers’ professional vision” (Sherin, 2007). Drawing on Goodwin
(1994), professional vision can be understood as the ways in which members of a
professional discipline attend to the phenomena of interest to them. For teachers,
this professional vision entails how teachers identify signicant interactions in the
context of a classroom.
In prior work, we have proposed that teachers’ professional vision is com-
prised of two key processes, selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning. Selec-
tive attention involves how teachers determine where to focus their attention in
the classroom. Miller (2011) explains that for novices this may involve “cognitive
tunneling,” in which one attends to only a small subset of the available phenom-
ena. In contrast, more expert noticing will likely involve selecting from among
Interpretive Frames 5
all the available phenomena, those that are most relevant, what Mason (2011)
refers to as “marking.” Knowledge-based reasoning, in contrast, concerns how a
teacher reasons about what is noticed. That is, what kind of meaning or signi-
cance does the teacher attribute to a particular interaction? Teachers have a host
of knowledge of their students, school, curriculum, etc., from which they can
draw to make sense of (or interpret) what is noticed. In addition to “attending to
key events” and “interpreting key events” (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011), some
researchers also include the act of planning to respond as part of noticing ( Jacobs,
Lamb, & Philipp, 2010).
While these three sub-processes can be talked about independently, research
highlights the close connection among them. In particular, Jacobs et al. (2010)
explain that “attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond [occur] …
almost simultaneously, as if constituting a single, integrated teaching move”
(p. 173). They document that the process of selective attention provides a foun-
dation upon which learning to respond can be built. In our own prior work,
we explored the connection between selective attention and knowledge-based
reasoning (Sherin, 2007) and found that these processes are cyclic and mutually
reinforcing. That is, noticing a particular event or interaction prompted teachers
to reason about that event, and subsequently, the ways that teachers reasoned
about events in turn prompted them to notice particular kinds of elements in
the classroom.
We intend interpretive frames to further specify the relationship between the
sub-processes involved in teacher noticing. In particular, they are structures that
describe the ways in which a teacher’s selective attention both grows out of
and informs his or her knowledge-based reasoning, and vice versa. That is, the
“cyclic” and “integrated” nature of the sub-processes of selective attention and
knowledge-based reasoning are formalized by, evident in, and dened by the
interpretive frame.
Methods
Much of our prior work on teacher noticing took place in the context of
video clubs in which groups of mathematics teachers met to watch and dis-
cuss excerpts of videos from their classes. The video clubs were facilitated by a
researcher who encouraged participating teachers to closely examine the math-
ematical ideas that students raised in the video. We found that, as a result of
participating in a video club, teachers’ professional vision developed in signi-
cant ways. In particular, teachers shifted from an initial focus on pedagogy and
management to a focus on students’ mathematical thinking, and furthermore,
they moved from evaluation to interpretation of students’ thinking (van Es &
Sherin, 2010).
6 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
Video clubs purposefully provide scaolds—in the form of both a knowledge-
able facilitator who encourages particular types of noticing and peers who build
on one another’s noticing—to support participants in noticing substantive student
thinking. In that sense, one can understand video clubs as zones of proximal devel-
opment (ZPD) (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988) for eliciting and studying teacher notic-
ing. While we certainly want and need to know what teachers do when supported
in these contexts, the noticing that drives teacher responsiveness during instruction
occurs in isolation, often without those supports. As such, we wanted to explore the
kinds of classroom interactions that were typically salient to teachers and the ways
in which teachers, unassisted by a facilitator or peers, interpret such events.
In this chapter we examine the nature of teacher noticing that is outside of
that ZPD by using video-based noticing interviews to investigate how teachers
make sense of classroom interactions. We conducted a study of 15 middle and
high school mathematics teachers, all of whom taught in the same school district
in the western United States located approximately 60 miles from a large urban
city. The student population in the district is diverse and includes a large Latino
and ESL community. The teachers had a range of teaching experience of between
1 and 15 years.
In the noticing interviews, teachers were asked to view and then comment
on four short video excerpts from other teachers’ mathematics classes. Speci-
cally, after the rst video excerpt was played, the researcher would ask: “What
did you notice in the video?” Following the teacher’s response, the researcher
would ask: “Is there anything else you noticed?” The teacher would again have an
opportunity to respond. Next, the researcher would probe “Anything else?” This
continued until the teacher responded that he or she had nothing additional to
add. This process was repeated for all four videos. The interviews were videotaped
and lasted between 20 and 40 minutes.
The focus of these interviews was on soliciting from teachers what stood out
to them in the video. Note that the task we engaged the teachers in was not a
pedagogical one; at no point did the interviewer ask the teachers how they would
respond to the events in the video if they were the teacher. Additionally, the inter-
viewer did not probe the teachers about “why” they noticed the things that they
did. As much as possible, we simply wanted to elicit from the teachers what was
salient for them in the videos.
Given our purpose for the interview, we selected videos that provided evi-
dence of students engaging in substantive mathematics work. Beyond that initial
criterion, we chose four videos that represented a range of participant structures,
math content areas, and instructional strategies (see Table 1.1). We did so for two
reasons. First, we wanted to ensure that each teacher would nd at least one of
the videos familiar to them based on their own typical instructional approaches.
Second, since teachers can only notice what they have opportunities to notice,
we wanted to be sure to present them with a range of opportunities such that
everyone would nd something worth noticing.
Interpretive Frames 7
TABLE 1.1 Video Excerpts Used in Noticing Interviews
Duration Math Topic
Grade
Level
Participant
Structure Summary
Video 1 1.5 minutes Calculating
Slope
High
School
Teacher-
Student
One-on-
one
Student and teacher
discuss problem that
student says she is
confused about
Video 2 4.5 minutes Use of
Pythagorean
Formula
High
School
Whole
Class
Teacher poses question
to class. Teacher directs
discussion with student
input.
Video 3 3.5 minutes Estimating
Ratios
Middle
School
Whole
Class
Student presentation
at the board followed
by student-to-student
discussion
Video 4 6 minutes Writing
Equations
Middle
School
Student
Small
Group
Work
Group of students
work together to write
an equation. Teacher
approaches group and
asks for explanation of
solution.
Analysis
Stage 1: Segmenting the Interview Transcripts
Analysis of the noticing interviews proceeded through several stages. In stage one,
the interview transcripts were divided into idea units ( Jacobs & Morita, 2002).
These were segments of teacher talk in which a single topic was discussed. Two
researchers segmented each transcript. Inter-rater reliability was over 85%, and
disagreements were resolved through consensus. The individual interviews con-
sisted of between 13 and 26 idea units each, with a total of 229 idea units across
the 15 interviews.
Stage 2: Coding for Selective Attention and
Knowledge-Based Reasoning
In stage two, each idea unit was coded along several dimensions to explore
aspects of the teachers’ selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning.
Dimensions and codes were both theoretically driven by prior research (etic)
and emergent (emic) from the data (van Es & Sherin, 2008). Two researchers
coded each interview transcript. Inter-rater reliability was above 80% on all
categories across all teachers and averaged 90%. Disagreements were resolved
through consensus.
8 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
With regard to selective attention, we coded along two categories: topic (what
was discussed) and actor (who was discussed). With regard to knowledge-based
reasoning, we coded along three categories: stance (whether a descriptive, evalu-
ative, or interpretive approach was used); level of specicity (general or specic);
and video-based (whether teachers’ comments primarily concerned events that
were within or outside of the video viewed).
The application of the video-based category represented a turning point in
our analysis. In looking across the idea units from the interviews, a member of the
research team noticed that some teachers tended to talk about their own class-
rooms rather than the classrooms displayed in the clips. At rst we were puzzled.
Why would teachers talk about their own classrooms when asked to describe
what they noticed in video excerpts from other teachers’ classrooms? When look-
ing across instances of the “outside video” code, we realized that teachers referred
to their own classrooms as a way to explain what they noticed in the video clips.
For example, Bill commented, “If this were my school and I handed somebody
a ruler, it wouldn’t be long before somebody was swinging it at somebody [else].
So, I would be very, very close in monitoring the person with the ruler.” Here Bill
noticed that a student in the video has a meter stick and explains that if he were
the teacher, he would stick close by that student.
Stage 3: Identifying Interpretive Frames
To explore this issue further, in stage three of the analysis, rather than using mul-
tiple, mutually independent categories and codes to characterize idea units, we
began to look holistically at each unit by treating the entire unit as evidence of
a coherent strategy. To do so, we drew on prior research that identied types of
strategies that teachers used to discuss instructional situations (e.g., Borko et al.
2008; Carter, Sabers, Cushing, Pinnegar, & Berliner, 1987; Copeland, Birmingham,
DeMeulle, D’Emidio-Caston, & Natal, 1994). We also drew on research on read-
ing comprehension strategies (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Dixon & Moore, 1990),
hypothesizing that reading a text and “reading” a video might share some key
features (Goldman-Segall, 1998).
Thus, with potential strategies in mind, we began to review a subset of the
data, noting both conrming and disconrming evidence of teachers’ use of the
selected strategies. Through an iterative process again involving both etic and emic
codes, we identied a stable set of 13 strategies—or interpretive frames—that the
teachers used during the noticing interviews. Our use of the word framing is
intentional; it has both intuitive appeal and grounding in the research. Intuitively,
“frames” (like eyeglass frames) invoke the notion of having a lens through which
we see the world. Within research in sociolinguistics and anthropology (Goman,
1974; Tannen, 1993), frames are a person’s way of making sense of all that goes on
in the world. Additionally, the adjective “interpretive” is meant to centralize and
highlight the active sense making that teachers engage in as they observe classroom
Interpretive Frames 9
activity. That is, frames are not imposed on the teachers; teachers actively and
dynamically (though tacitly) construct those frames as they make meaning of (or
interpret) the video.
Stage 4: Coding for Use of Interpretive Frames
Finally, in stage four, two researchers used the 13 interpretive frames identied in
stage three to systematically code the entire data set. This process involved cod-
ing each idea unit for the presence or absence of each of the 13 frames. As such,
a teacher could be found to use multiple interpretive frames within a single idea
unit. Two researchers coded the entire data set. A total of 429 codes were applied
to the data. In the nal phase of analysis, we noted how many teachers used each
of the 13 interpretive frames and the average number of idea units in which each
interpretive frame was used.
Results
The main result of our analysis is an observation about the nature of teach-
ers’ professional vision. When teachers talk about what they notice, they do not
simply provide a list of items or events that were noticed. Instead, they describe
their thinking about what they notice. Furthermore, these descriptions are usually
embedded within an extended story or an explanation or hypothesis about what
is going on.
An Extended Example of Interpretive Frames in Action
Consider, for example, the following comments from Debbie, after having watched
the rst video clip.
MIRIAM: Okay, so what did you notice as you watched the clip?
DEBBIE: A lot of tapping. I noticed about two or three boys that were constantly
tapping, and I wanted to touch them [and say] “Stop!” This young man up in
front, for a while he was just, just looking around. … The teacher was helping
a student individually, trying to help her understand how to do something.
And for a while it seemed like the student was starting to understand—and
then all of a sudden, well, “I don’t understand, that’s why I’m asking you.” I
thought that was funny.
Debbie’s initial remarks concern two boys tapping their pencils on their desks.
She began “I noticed a lot of tapping” and immediately went on to explain that
she wanted to stop the boys herself. What is important here is that Debbie did
not just tell us that she noticed the tapping. Instead, her comments reveal how
she understood what she noticed. In this case, Debbie made sense of what she
10 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
noticed as if she were the teacher in the video. For example, it seems possible that
the boys’ tapping might have stood out to Debbie because, as a teacher, she would
have wanted it to stop.
As she continued, Debbie commented that the teacher was helping a student
and that the student seemed to be understanding but “all of a sudden” declared,
“I don’t understand, that’s why I’m asking you.” Once again, Debbie did not stop
after describing these events. Instead, she explains, “I thought that was funny.”
Debbie’s knowledge of what took place in the video appears tightly connected to
her feelings about what took place. Likely part of the reason this event stood out
for Debbie was precisely because it was funny to her.
These examples reect Debbie’s tacit use of dierent interpretive frames. She
took on the perspective of the teacher in the video and then had an aective
response to a student comment. Here, Debbie’s comments exemplify that noticing
is not equivalent to listing noticed events. Debbie did not merely list the events
she observed by saying something like: “I noticed that the boys are tapping their
pencils and then a girl makes a comment that she doesn’t understand.” In this way,
Debbie’s noticing does not operate under the rules of what Collins & Ferguson
(1993) call the “list making” epistemic game. She seems to tacitly take her task to
be something more than that by automatically integrating her knowledge-based
reasoning into her account of her selective attention.
Additionally, we could imagine Debbie noticing the same events but talking
about them in dramatically dierent ways. For example, we could imagine Debbie
discussing the tapping using the aective frame she applied to the student com-
ment about not understanding. She might have said, “Oh, that tapping just makes
my skin crawl!” A question for us as researchers is whether these dierences in
interpretive frames constitute dierent noticing. In what ways are these dier-
ences consequential for supporting change in teacher noticing? We will take up
this point later in the chapter.
Debbie’s interpretive frames highlight a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario with
regards to selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning. In each interpretive
frame, the way Debbie makes sense of the video (her knowledge-based reasoning) is
both constrained by and contributes to what she notices in the video (her selective
attention). For example, she notices the boys tapping because she would want to stop
it, and she would want to stop it because she notices it. This issue suggests the need
to consider whether and how attention can or should be disentangled from inter-
pretation. For us in this work, interpretive frames eliminate the need to analytically
impose boundaries between selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning.
A Summary of the Interpretive Frames
The extended example from Debbie reects what we saw across the noticing
interviews. In what follows, we describe the frames in more detail using selected
examples from the data. See Table 1.2 for a summary. Also, in order to help the
Interpretive Frames 11
TABLE 1.2 Interpretive Frames Used by Teachers to Discuss What They Noticed in Video
Excerpts of Math Classes
Interpretive Frame Denition Example
No. teachers
using frame
No. (and %)
of idea units
in which
frame used
Aective Describes
an aective
reaction to
video
“I’m jealous of
the high ceiling
with the use of the
overhead. I can’t
even use one in my
class because of the
computers.”
13 31 (14%)
Alternatives Oers
alternatives to
actions in video
“Instead of showing
them by drawing
lines [herself ], she
could have used the
students to explain
the concept.”
7 27 (18%)
Anomaly Identies
something
unexpected or
surprising
“I was shocked to
see a chalkboard. I
hadn’t seen those in
a while.”
6 15 (7%)
Casual
Relationships
Relates events
in the video by
cause and eect
“It’s almost as if,
because the teacher
was far away, they
didn’t have to do
what they were
supposed to do.”
7 47 (21%)
Comparison Compares video
to something
that occurred
elsewhere
“Her kids are really
good at participating.
My kids have a lot
of trouble with
that ...”
14 67 (29%)
Evaluation Assesses the
quality of the
video content
“I think it was good
how they were all
working in groups
on dierent things.”
15 107 (47%)
Generalization Identies
specic behavior
or activity that
takes place
across multiple
teaching
contexts
“It’s hard when
you go over to a
student and ask,
“What don’t you
understand?”, and
they’re trying to tell
you, but they don’t
know what they
don’t understand.”
13 63 (14%)
(Continued)
12 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
Interpretive Frame Denition Example
No. teachers
using frame
No. (and %)
of idea units
in which
frame used
Familiarity Identies aspect
of video as
recognizable
“I’m a big overhead
person so I
understand that.”
3 10 (4%)
Metaphor Uses a metaphor
to describe
aspect of video
“She’s the pied
piper to them.
They’re ready
to follow her
anywhere.”
2 7 (3%)
Perspective
Taking
Imagines him
or herself in
position of
someone in
the video
“If I were the
teacher I would
have wanted to
gather the class’s
attention. I have a
thing that I do to get
everybody focused
on me with a hand
signal.”
4 32 (14%)
Principles Refers to a
general principle
of teaching and
learning
“If the teacher’s
back is turned,
that’s when the fun
begins.”
9 18 (8%)
Storytelling Relates a series
of events as
occurring
sequentially
“She lectures, they
copy down notes,
then they practice
the problem. Then
she walks around
to see how they’re
doing.”
3 57 (25%)
What’s Not
There
Identies
something absent
from video
“What I was looking
for but didn’t see
was any mention
of the shape of the
graph.”
4 11 (5%)
reader recognize the relationship among the dierent frames, we present them
here as elements of six cluster groups.
Narrative Frames
This rst cluster consists of two frames in which teachers described what they
noticed by providing a narrative that connects events in a video to one another. This
cluster is closest to the type of “list making” that we might have initially expected
Interpretive Frames 13
teachers to do while reviewing the video. In fact, in the storytelling frame, teachers
related a series of events as occurring sequentially in a video. For example, Susan
explained what she noticed: “She lectures, they copy down notes, and then they
practice the problem. Then she walks around to see how they’re [doing].” In previ-
ous work, we characterized pre-service teachers as typically describing events that
took place in their own classroom by listing chronologically what had occurred
(van Es & Sherin, 2002). Here we have evidence that even some teachers with more
extensive teaching experience (though only 3 for a total of 25% of the overall idea
units) also engaged in this type of list making. However, the relative infrequency of
this frame adds support to our assumption that something more complex than list
making is going on as teachers describe what they noticed in the videos.
Causal relationships is another frame in which teachers used a narrative to make
connections among events in a video. In this case, however, the teachers’ statements
suggested that the events in the narrative were related by cause and eect. For exam-
ple, Marie stated, “It’s almost as if, because the teacher was far away, [the students]
didn’t have to do what they were supposed to do.” Copeland et al. (1994) identify a
similar approach that teachers used to make meaning of video-taped lessons, assert-
ing causal relationships specically between teacher and student actions. The frame
was used by seven of the teachers, across 18% of the total number of idea units.
Normative Frames
The next cluster includes interpretive frames in which teachers assess the qual-
ity of the events in a video using normative metrics. In particular, we found that
teachers frequently evaluated what they noticed in the video excerpts, making
comments such as: “I don’t think that explanation is going to be very helpful” or
“These kids are really good at participating.” Across all of these comments was a
reaction from the teachers as to the merit of the events they viewed. This type of
evaluative approach on the part of teachers has been descr ibed extensively in the
research literature and may reect the strong culture of assessment that generally
pervades schools in the United States today (Levin, Hammer, & Coey, 2009).
A related interpretive frame involved teachers oering alternatives to the actions
that took place in the videos. In some sense this was an extension of the evaluative
frame. Before oering an alternative choice, teachers must at least tacitly rst have
found the existing choice lacking along some metric. Suggested alternatives most
often concerned the teachers’ actions, such as “Instead of showing them by draw-
ing lines [herself], she could have used the student’s example to explain the con-
cept.” Because teaching requires making quick decisions about how to respond, it
may have seemed quite natural to teachers to oer alternatives related to specic
teaching interactions (Sherin & Han, 2004).
All 15 of the participating teachers used the evaluation frame in just over 47%
of the total number of idea units. This was the most commonly used interpretive
frame that we identied. The frequency of this type of frame is not surprising
14 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
given the extent to which standards and metrics of “goodness” are regularly dis-
cussed with respect to teaching. The alternatives frame was used less often, by seven
teachers in 18% of the total ideas units.
Personal Frames
The next two interpretive frames we describe involve teachers experiencing a
personal connection to the events in the video. In one case, teachers placed them-
selves in the action going on in the video. We refer to this frame as perspective tak-
ing. This most often occurred when the teacher imagined himself or herself in the
role of the teacher in the video. For example, Dan explained:
I’m sort of puzzled why he let the girls on as long as he did. … Once I
saw them oundering, I would be tempted not to let them hang that long
before kind of stepping in and trying to redirect the class. Just out of a desire
to protect their feelings.
It seems likely that these events stood out to the teachers because they were
able to imagine how they would react if they had been an actor in the classroom
itself.
The aective interpretive frame is similar in that teachers express a personal
connection to the video, although in this case, the reaction reects an emotional
reaction. For instance, Nick commented, “I’m jealous of the high ceilings,” and
Dan mentioned being annoyed by the teacher’s voice, “[It] gets on your nerves.”
While we cannot know for sure, it may be the case that a strong aective response
serves as an important trigger for teachers to pay close attention to what is taking
place in the video.
Despite being reported as a central strategy for text comprehension (Dixon &
Moore, 1990), perspective taking was used infrequently in our data set—among
only four teachers and in 14% of the idea units. In contrast, many more teachers
described having an aective response to a video. This occurred in 13 of the 15
teachers, though again in only 14% of the idea units. It may be that teachers place
themselves inside the action only when the instruction pictured in the video is
consistent with their own pedagogical approaches.
Expectation Frames
Three interpretive frames concern the degree to which teachers were accus-
tomed to seeing, or expected to see, the events that appeared in the video. Spe-
cically, when drawing on the familiarity frame, teachers identied an aspect of
the video as recognizable, as a kind of interaction or event with which they are
well acquainted. For example, Sophia commented: “I’m a big overhead person,
so I understand [why she does] that,” while Nick explained, “We have that in
Interpretive Frames 15
our school here too, quite a few children that you need to group with somebody
because they don’t [speak English].”
Somewhat in contrast to the familiarity frame is the anomaly frame in which a
teacher comments on an unusual or unexpected aspect of the video. For example,
Debbie stated, “I was shocked to see a chalkboard, I hadn’t seen those in a while,”
and Matt commented, “I noticed there was a guy wearing a hat. [Students are] not
supposed to wear hats in class.”
The third interpretive frame, what’s not there, involved teachers responding to
something they recognized as being missing from a video. For example, Marie
mentioned, “What I was looking for, but didn’t see, was any mention of the shape
of the graph.” To Marie, it would have been quite natural for the teacher and
student in the rst video to talk about slope in terms of the graph’s shape. When
they didn’t do this, Marie noticed.
In all three of these frames, teachers reacted to whether or not the actions
viewed on the video align or misalign with their expectations. This is not uncom-
mon. A wealth of research cites the importance of our prior experiences and
expectations in making sense of situations (Chabris & Simons, 2009). These three
interpretive frames echo that work in that teachers’ prior experiences in class-
rooms directly inuence the interactions they expect to see. Nevertheless, these
frames were used by only a small proportion of the 15 teachers: three teachers
used the familiarity frame in 4% of the total number of idea units; a few more, six
teachers, used the anomaly frame in 7% of the total number of idea units; and four
teachers applied the what’s not there frame in 5% of the idea units.
Associative Frames
Next we discuss two frames in which teachers associated the events in a video to
other situations or experiences. In the comparison frame, teachers made explicit
comparisons between an aspect of a video clip and other circumstances. Teachers
applied this frame in a few dierent ways: (1) to draw a comparison to another video
clip—“Compared to the last video clip … this one seemed like a smaller class;”
(2) to their own classroom—“These students are bigger than mine, [they] must be
high school;” or (3) to highlight dierences within a single video excerpt—“The
second question seemed much harder for [the students].”
Unlike the expectations frame, in the comparison frame, what stood out to the
teachers was not whether the events in the video aligned with their expecta-
tions but simply whether the events were distinct from other events. This kind
of comparison may have been much easier for teachers to make, and in fact, the
comparison frame was used relatively frequently among the teachers. Fourteen of
the 15 teachers used this frame, and it appeared in 29% of the total number of
idea units.
A related interpretive frame is the metaphor frame. Here teachers also engaged
in comparison, but they compared a component of a video to an abstract but
16 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
familiar or colloquial idea rather than another concrete event. For example, The-
resa describes the teacher in one clip as “the pied piper,” able to gather her stu-
dents together in discussion.
“[The teacher’s] dragging them all up there, come on, come on, come on,
come out and play. … She’s the pied piper to them. They’re ready to follow her
anywhere.”
Metaphors allow us to think about and articulate ideas that are challenging to
dene. Specically, they help us make sense of one situation by drawing on the
meaning associated with another experience (Lako & Johnson, 1980). We sus-
pect that the teachers’ use of the metaphor frame structured the ways they thought
about and described aspects of the clips that were dicult to succinctly and clearly
convey. In all, this interpretive frame was used by only two of the teachers and in
just 3% of the total number of idea units.
Abstraction Frames
Two nal frames involve teachers looking beyond the details of a video to make
abstract claims about teaching and learning. First, using the generalization frame,
teachers describe what they notice in the video as behavior or activity that takes
place across multiple teaching contexts. For example, in discussing what she
noticed in the rst video, Nicole comments: “Sometimes as a teacher, it’s hard
when you go over to a student and ask them, ‘What don’t you understand,’ and
they’re trying to tell you, but they don’t even know what they don’t under-
stand.” Rather than describe an event in the video as salient only in this particular
case, Nicole shares an idea she believes to be endemic to instructional situations.
These statements are similar to what Copeland et al. (1994) dene as “practical
generalizations.”
Closely connected to the generalization interpretive frame is the principles inter-
pretive frame. With the principles frame, teachers express the generalization or
abstraction in a particular form — as a short statement of an overall truth concern-
ing teaching and learning. Shulman (1986) described this as a type of propositional
knowledge held by teachers, “maxims [that] represent the accumulated wisdom of
practice” (p. 11). Marie’s comment that “Communication is the key to teaching” is
one such example from the data. Both of these frames were used by the majority
of teachers, 13 teachers utilized the generalization frame in a total of 14% of the idea
units; 11 teachers applied the principles frame in 8% of the total number of idea units.
Discussion
While the above summary of each of the frames tacitly puts them all on equal foot-
ing, there are some frames that were used more frequently and/or used by more
teachers than others. First, the aective, comparison, and evaluation frames were used
by 13, 14, and 15 teachers, respectively. Furthermore, evaluation was also the most
Interpretive Frames 17
frequently used frame; it was not only used by all of the teachers, it was also the
frame used most often by each individual teacher. This is not surprising given the
extent to which evaluation has been highlighted by previous research as a stance
teachers take to discuss teaching episodes. However, it may be of concern given
current eorts to move teachers away from initial evaluations of teaching episodes
and toward more in-depth analyses of what is taking place (Borko et al., 2008).
To be clear, we suspect that the frames we have identied above may be par-
ticular to the interview context in which we elicited teacher noticing. That is, the
ways that teachers engaged in the task and explained their reasoning was likely
inuenced by the fact that they were in an interview with researchers. However,
we contend that the phenomenon of teachers using interpretive frames to reason
about classroom events is durable beyond the interview context. Although the
specics of the frames would likely change if we examined attention and reason-
ing during instruction, we believe that interpretive frames would continue to
shape teacher noticing.
It is intuitively obvious that teachers cannot notice everything that happens in
their classrooms. Just as everyday people go through the world selectively paying
attention to what they encounter, so too must teachers in the classroom. Research
conrms this intuition and has in the past explored the “what” and “how” and
“why” behind teacher noticing. In this work, we describe teacher noticing in the
context of noticing interviews. In these interviews, teachers were given the luxury
of time to notice and interpret events in video but did so independently without
the modeling and support of peers or an expert facilitator. As such, these interviews
give us extended access to some of the reasoning that underlies teacher attention.
In other work we have described two distinct sub-processes of noticing; selec-
tive attention and knowledge-based reasoning (Sherin, 2007). In this chapter we
have used the construct of interpretive frames to highlight a connection between
the two. Specically, we suggest that these two sub-processes occur neither sepa-
rately nor sequentially. That is, teachers do not rst attend to a classroom event,
then use their knowledge to reason about that event, then attend to another event,
and then reason about that event. If attending and interpreting were related in
this way, we would expect teachers in our interviews to list o a moment that
that they notice, then talk about that moment, then list o another moment
that occurred after the rst, talk about it, and so on. Teachers’ talk in our inter-
views, however, resembled something dierent. It was a wandering trek through
a network of interconnected ideas—some about normative metrics, some about
expectations, some about personal feelings, and some about abstractions. Linearity
is not a common feature in teachers’ conversations about what they notice. This
lack of linearity in their talk suggests that for teachers, classrooms likely cannot
be reduced to a chronological series of events from which they pick the most
important ones to attend. As such, researchers may no longer be able to character-
ize teacher noticing as a set of events that together make up “the teacher’s view
of the classroom.” Instead, we will need to develop more sophisticated ways to
18 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
characterize the network of ideas that teachers bring to bear in reasoning about
their classrooms. Our interpretive frames are an attempt at such a characterization.
It is in this sense—interpretive frames as networks of ideas that support both
selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning—that the construct of framing
becomes particularly powerful. Other education researchers have explored how
framing can dramatically inuence the actions and interactions of both teachers
and students (Rosenberg, Hammer, & Phelan, 2006; Russ & Luna, 2013; Scherr &
Hammer, 2009). The idea that teachers adopt interpretive frames during noticing
highlights how quickly interpretation enters into classroom dynamics. There is no
objective “blooming, buzzing confusion” (Sherin & Star, 2011, p. 69) that teachers
see and then reason about. Instead, seeing and interpreting happen together at the
same time that classroom interactions are unfolding and playing back into that
seeing and interpreting.
This notion of interpretive frames also has important practical implications.
Much of our professional development work with teachers has been in the con-
text of preparing teachers to “see” certain kinds of events in their classrooms.
As have others, we have attempted to develop materials and programs to focus
teachers’ attention on some of the most consequential aspects of instruction, stu-
dents’ thinking, classroom discourse, explanation and argumentation, for example.
However, focusing a teacher’s attention on particular aspects of classroom interac-
tions and events does not tell the whole story. We need to consider the reasoning
strategies that are used in conjunction with these noticing habits and how to help
teachers develop these noticing networks in productive ways.
References
Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in
reading comprehension. In P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 255–291).
New York: Longman.
Borko, H., Jacobs, J., Eiteljorg, E., & Pittman, M. E. (2008). Video as a tool for foster ing
productive discussions in mathematics professional development. Teaching and Teacher
Education, 24, 417–436.
Carter, K., Sabers, D., Cushing, K., Pinnegar, P., & Berliner, D. C. (1987). Processing and
using information about students: a study of expert, novice, and postulant teachers.
Teaching and Teacher Education, 3, 147–157.
Chabris, C. F., & Simons, D. J. (2009). The invisible gorilla: And other ways our intuitions deceive
us. New York: Random House.
Collins, A., & Ferguson, W. (1993). Epistemic forms and epistemic games: Structures and
strategies to guide inquiry. Educational Psychologist, 28(1), 25–42.
Copeland, W. D., Birmingham, C., DeMeulle, L., D’Emidio-Caston, M., & Natal, D. (1994).
Making meaning in classrooms: An investigation of cognitive processes in aspiring
teachers, experienced teachers, and their peers. American Educational Research Journal,
31(1), 166–196.
Dixon, J. A., & Moore, C. F. (1990). The development of perspective taking: Understanding
dierences in information and weighting. Child Development, 61(5), 1502–1513.
Interpretive Frames 19
Goman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books.
Goldman-Segall, R. (1998). Points of viewing children’s thinking: A digital ethnographer’s journey.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96, 606–633.
Jacobs, V. R., Lamb, L. C., & Philipp, R. A. (2010). Professional noticing of children’s math-
ematical thinking. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41, 169–202.
Jacobs, J. K., & Morita, E. (2002). Japanese and American teachers’ evaluations of video-
taped mathematics lessons. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 33(3), 154–175.
Lako, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Levin, D. M., Hammer, D., & Coey, J. E. (2009). Novice teachers’ attention to student
thinking. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(2), 142–154.
Mason, J. (2011). Noticing: Roots and branches. In M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, &
R. A. Philipp (Eds.), Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers’ eyes (pp. 35–50).
New York: Routledge.
Miller, K. F. (2011). Situation awareness in teaching. In M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, &
R. A. Philipp (Eds.), Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers’ eyes (pp. 51–65).
New York: Routledge.
Rosenberg, S. A., Hammer, D., & Phelan, J. (2006). Multiple epistemological coherences
in an eighth-grade discussion of the rock cycle. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(2),
261–292.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro,
B. C. Bruce, & W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension
(pp. 33–58). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Russ, R. S., & Luna, M. J. (2013). Inferring teacher epistemological framing from locale
patterns in teacher noticing. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(3), 284–314.
Russ, R. S., & Sherin, M. G. (2013, April). A model of change: Connecting teacher noticing to
improved student learning outcomes. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Ameri-
can Educational Research Association, San Francisco.
Scherr, R. E., & Hammer, D. (2009). Student behavior and epistemological framing: Exam-
ples from collaborative active-learning activities in physics. Cognition and Instruction.
Sherin, M. G. (2004). New perspectives on the role of video in teacher education. In
J. Brophy (Ed.), Using video in teacher education (pp.1–27). NY: Elsevier Science.
Sherin, M. G. (2007). The development of teachers’ professional vision in video clubs. In
R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron, & S. Derry (Eds.), Video research in the learning sciences
(pp. 383–395). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sherin, M. G., & Han, S. (2004). Teacher learning in the context of a video club. Teaching
and Teacher Education, 20, 163–183.
Sherin, M. G., Jacobs, V. R., & Philipp, R. A. (Eds.) (2011). Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing
through teachers’ eyes. New York: Routledge.
Sherin, B. L., & Star, J. (2011). Reections on the study of teacher noticing. In M. G. Sherin,
V. R. Jacobs, & R. A. Philipp (Eds.), Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers’
eyes (pp. 66–78). New York: Routledge.
Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching. Educational
Researcher, 15(4), 3–14.
Tannen, D. (1993). Framing in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in
social context. New York: Cambridge University Press.
20 Part I: Teacher Learning with Digital Video
van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaolding new teachers’ inter-
pretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4),
571–596.
van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2008). Mathematics teachers “learning to notice” in the
context of a video club. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 244–276.
van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2010). The inuence of video clubs on teachers’ thinking
and practice. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 13, 155–176.