The Impact of Learning to Notice Mathematics Teaching and Learning on Preservice Teachers’ Classroom Practice

• In Event: Translating Thought Into Action: How Digital Video Use Benefits Teachers

Abstract

The ability to attend to and reason about student thinking, what is referred to as “noticing” (Jacobs et al., 2010; Mason, 2002), has been identified as an important teaching skill. In the moment of teaching, teachers make choices about what to attend to, they reason about what they observe, and then decide what to do next. Given the goals of mathematics instruction (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Lampert et al., 2010), I propose that pre-service teachers need to learn to notice student thinking. Research on expert-novice differences shows that expert teachers are skilled at noticing student thinking and using what they learn to make informed pedagogical decisions (Berliner, 2001). However, novice teachers do not have well-developed noticing skills. They do not enter teacher education programs with observation skills (Star & Strickland, 2008; van Es & Sherin, 2002), nor do they have established frameworks to help them identify and interpret classroom interactions that promote teaching mathematics for understanding. This paper seeks to examine the impact that a video-based pre-service teacher education course, Learning to Learn from Teaching (LLfT), designed to scaffold pre-service teachers to learn to notice student thinking, had on pre-service teachers’ classroom practice and analyses of teaching.
The LLfT course used video of teaching (e.g. Boaler & Humphreys, 2005; Seago, Mumme, & Branca, 2004) to develop pre-service teachers’ noticing of student thinking, effective teaching practices for making thinking visible and available for analysis, and for analyzing the impact of teaching on learning (Hufferd-Ackles, et al., 2004; Santagata & van Es, 2010; Stein et al., 2009). In addition, pre-service teachers completed two field-based assignments, a student interview and small group discussion, in which they employed techniques they observed in video and then reflected on their enactments of teaching.
Data for this study include videos and analyses of teaching of two cohorts of pre-service teachers, one that participated in the LLfT course and another that did not participate in the course. Both cohorts completed the PACT-Teaching Event, a portfolio assessment of a 3-5 day lesson sequence that includes lesson plans, assessments, and video and reflections of teaching. Qualitative analysis consisted of examining differences between the two cohorts’ noticing of student thinking in teaching and their attention to student thinking and learning in their analysis and reflection of practice.
Preliminary analysis shows that the LLfT cohort provided increased opportunities for student thinking to be made public, they probed students for explanations of their thinking, and they used evidence of student thinking to make claims about the effectiveness of their instruction. These results suggest that they employed pedagogical strategies for attending to student thinking in teaching that they learned in the course, as well as techniques for analyzing and reflecting on their practice. This study demonstrates that a course focused on learning to learn from practice (Hiebert et al., 2007) can provide pre-service teachers with a set of competencies to put them on a trajectory of developing teaching expertise.

Author

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Irvine