Framing the Task: Variation in One Teacher's Attention to Students' Ideas Across Disciplinary Practices

• In Event: Differing Notions of Responsive Teaching Across Mathematics and Science: Does the Discipline Matter?

Abstract

Purpose

This study focuses on an elementary teacher’s noticing and responding to his students’ ideas as they engage in science disciplinary practices. I show that what the teacher counts as “noticing student ideas” can vary according to the type of activity in which the students are engaged.

Theoretical Framework

What teachers notice in student thinking, and even what counts as noticing student thinking, is context-dependent and particularly sensitive to the teacher’s epistemological framing of the activity—his sense of what counts as knowledge and learning in a given moment. Thus, two bodies of prior research inform this work: (1) teacher noticing (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011) and, (2) teacher epistemological framing (Levin, Hammer, & Coffey, 2009). Specifically, this work examines a teacher’s epistemological framing of the very specific activity of noticing students’ science ideas.

Methods

To accomplish this, I equipped the teacher with a wearable camera that continuously records what the teacher is seeing and hearing; but it only saves the 60 seconds of footage that occurred immediately before the teacher pushes a button. The camera can save several hours of these 60-second snippets, thereby capturing events the teacher noticed immediately after the fact.

Data sources and evidence

The teacher wore this camera on thirteen occasions while teaching and was instructed to “capture students’ science ideas.” After each lesson, I reviewed each captured moment with the teacher to clarify the student’s idea and why it was chosen. Data consist of 411 video clips each with a corresponding reflection. The analysis presented in this paper uses a similar analytical approach to Colleague & Author (2013), using bottom-up coding to classify different types of captured moments, to identify patterns in those moments, and to infer from these patterns the different frames the teacher draws on when attending to students’ ideas.

Results

Across the 13 tapings, the teacher captures many different kinds of moments, from students sharing examples, to guessing outcomes, to describing instances. However, he captures three specific kinds of moments more often than others: (1) factual statements offered by students while telling information, (2) descriptions offered by students while constructing meaning, and (3) explanations offered by students while drawing conclusions. Category (1) “captures” occurred primarily during classroom activities the teacher identified as information sharing; category (2) captures primarily occurred during activities the teacher identified as sense-making; and category (3) captures occurred when the activity was drawing conclusions. This paper discusses his noticing patterns and the connection to disciplinary practices in more detail.

Scholarly Significance

This research contributes to our understanding of how teachers frame the nature of “responsiveness,” especially the noticing of student ideas. Responding to students’ science ideas involves more than the presence of ideas and the ability to notice those ideas. It also involves a teacher’s in-the-moment understanding of what counts as note-worthy ideas. This study shows that a teacher’s sense note-worthy ideas depends on the disciplinary practices in which he perceives the students to be engaged, motivating future research to investigate this connection in more detail.

Author

• Melissa J. Luna, West Virginia University