Supporting Teacher Noticing of Student Mathematical Thinking Through the Use of Online Tools

• In Event: Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing in Research on Teaching and Teacher Learning

Abstract

Learning to notice students’ mathematical thinking (SMT) has been found to support teachers in developing a responsive teaching practice (Thomas et al., 2015). While challenging to notice SMT, a range of in-person contexts have shown promise in scaffolding teachers to do so (e.g., Colleague & Author, 20xx; Jacobs et al., 2010). Less is known about how viewing and annotating videos in an online forum might support teachers in noticing SMT. The objective of this study was to explore the question: In what ways might online video annotation tools support teachers’ noticing of SMT?
Drawing on existing conceptualizations of noticing (e.g., Star & Strickland, 2008; van Es, 2011), we characterize noticing as attending to and interpreting sensory stimuli, and we frame noticing from a situative perspective (Greeno, 1998). We examined a six-week online professional development course in which 10 K-2 teachers from small suburban school districts in the midwestern United States participated. Each week, teachers recorded their students engaging in mathematical tasks, uploaded their video to the course platform, and remarked on their peers’ videos. Teachers used two tools to remark on peers’ videos, a commenting tool--which allowed teachers to view a video clip in its entirety and then write a summary note, and a tagging tool--which allowed teachers to mark moments of the video while viewing.
Data sources include 124 tags and 57 comments from the course platform. Methodologically, we segmented tags and comments into idea units (Jacobs & Morita, 2002), which resulted in 126 tag units and 97 comment units. We then coded tag and comment units along three dimensions: actor, topic, and video-based. Units coded as focused on students’ mathematical thinking from the video (SMTV) are the focus of our analysis.
Analyses revealed three key results. First, teachers noticed SMTV more in tags than comments; 89% of tag units were coded SMTV, while 71% of comment units were coded SMTV. Second, when teachers tagged and commented about the same video, the proportion of comment units coded SMTV was nearly identical to the proportion of tag units coded SMTV; 88% of comment units that co-occurred with tag units were coded SMTV. Further, when comparing tags and comments that co-occurred, we found that comments often expanded on tags in three distinct ways, by restating, exploring, or extending tag-noticings (Table 1); sometimes, teachers’ comments expanded from tags in multiple ways.
This study adds to the field’s understanding of how to design online spaces to support teachers’ noticing of SMTV. Specifically, these findings suggest that the tagging and commenting tools do not duplicate each other; rather, they interact in ways productive to teachers’ noticing of SMTV. When tags co-occurred with comments, tags seemed to support teachers in maintaining a focus on SMTV in their comments. When comments co-occurred with tags, comments seemed to support teachers in interpreting SMTV in increasingly complex ways. Future work might investigate how tags and comments function together to support teachers in noticing SMTV when viewing and annotating videos of their own students and instruction.

Authors

• Sarah Larison

• Jennifer Richards, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences

• Miriam G. Sherin, Northwestern University