The CAREER: Noticing and Capitalizing on Important Mathematical Moments in Instruction project investigated the outcomes of a teacher education field experience course that was redesigned to foster prospective mathematics teachers’ abilities to notice and propose productive responses to important mathematical moments that emerge from students during a lesson. Key features of the learning experience were engaging the participants in detailed analysis of classroom video using an analytic framework, use of full-length classroom video, and weekly facilitated meetings to support the participants’ mathematical noticing.

The findings revealed that the experience was successful in supporting prospective teachers’ noticing of important student contributions to a lesson. We documented that the participants became more focused on students, better able to discuss the mathematics underlying student comments, and better able to analyze student contributions in relation to their potential to support the learning of mathematics. Participants also improved in their ability to identify specific high-leverage instances of student thinking, although they were unable to identify all of the instances that were noted by experienced observers, as well as in their ability to propose teacher response moves that would allow students to collectively make sense of the mathematics in students’ comments. Later enactments of the learning experience, when a more specified noticing framework and more targeted scaffolding was used, were found to better support learning than earlier enactments when less structured supports were used. Follow-up work with the prospective teachers in their student teaching semester suggests that the redesigned learning experience helped them notice differently when they were teaching a lesson than their peers who did not participate in the experience. While their peers tended to notice their own teaching moves and whether student comments aligned with what they as the teacher expected, those who completed the intervention were more focused on a range of student comments.

In general, the findings suggest that using specified frameworks and having clear definitions for what is important to notice in a lesson has the potential to advance the work of teacher noticing. The work adds to what has been previously documented in the teacher noticing literature in several ways. First, the intervention took place at the start of a teacher education program, rather than later in the program as is often the case in noticing interventions. The findings suggest that noticing skills can be developed early on, even before prospective teachers have a lot of knowledge of teaching on which to draw. Second, many noticing interventions have focused on noticing around a single mathematics topic, such as proportional reasoning. Our videos were collected in a range of mathematics classes so the topics varied widely. The success of the work suggests that narrowing the mathematical focus in a noticing intervention may be unnecessary. Third, other noticing interventions tend to use short video clips to decrease the complexity of noticing. This intervention used full-length classroom video that encompasses the complexity of a classroom. The fact that noticing skills were developed in this context again suggests that providing a narrowed context in which to learn to notice may be unnecessary.

The project has the potential to impact mathematics teaching and learning well beyond the context of the study. The results contribute to the mathematics teacher education community’s understanding of ways to position novice teachers to continue to learn from practice over time by developing their ability to notice important student contributions—a skill foundational to student-focused instruction and to continued teacher learning. The project also contributes to teacher education practice by highlighting key supports that are important to supporting the development of noticing skills and by proposing a course design model for how noticing skills might be developed in a context that does not reduce the complexity of teaching.   

Last Modified: 04/24/2017
Modified by: Shari Stockero