What Teachers Notice About Students' Interactional Dynamics During Collaborative Mathematics and Their Connections to Practice

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

Abstract

This paper reports on an exploratory teacher professional development study focused on supporting teachers’ noticing of students’ collaborative dynamics during mathematics group work. We draw on frameworks for teacher noticing in the mathematics classroom (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011), which in particular focuses on teachers’ noticing of student mathematical thinking; however, this does not fully account for the complexity of the work students engage in during collaborative activity (Author, 2016). Students face challenges within the collaborative dynamics of group work that require negotiation and can serve to exclude some students from productive participation in mathematics (Author, 2011; 2013; 2016; Anderson, 2009; Kotsopoulos, 2014), and affect the construction of mathematics solutions pathways (Author, 2016). Noticing multi-layered aspects of student participation can be a lever for shifting teachers’ enactment of equitable teaching practices (Hand, 2012; Wager, 2014).
Our data draws from a broader research-practice partnership between the research team and an instructional team of five teachers (grades K, 1, 2, and 4) at an elementary school in Northern California. For this study, we focused on three professional development (PD) sessions offered during the academic year in which participating teachers collectively viewed video of student collaboration from one another’s classrooms. We extracted data from video records of the PD sessions by first selecting all whole group discussions. We then created analytic content logs for each of the discussions at the minute-by-minute level, recording the content of teachers’ talk. In two analytic columns of the content logs, we summarized any instances in which teachers: (a) noticed features from the video and (b) made connections to practice. Analytic content logs were then inductively coded to identify themes. The two authors coded both independently and jointly, in iterative rounds of coding across the entire corpus to develop categories of what teachers noticed and how they were connecting noticing to practice.
Our findings show that teachers noticed: (1) how challenging collaboration is for students; (2) the utility of social negotiations; (3) the affordances of student intellectual authority; and (4) the mechanics of collaboration. These themes seemed to emerge both in relation to the affordances of particular videos and over time as teachers built on what they noticed in prior sessions. As teachers noticed features of students’ collaborative dynamics, they also made connections to their teaching practice. While what teachers noticed shifted across the PD sessions, how they connected these noticings to practice remained constant. Across the academic year, teachers used the same three processes to connect what they noticed to practice: they (1) re-interpreted prior experiences, (2) mapped the terrain of collaborative work, and (3) identified value.
Our findings suggest overall that teachers can and do notice complex and multi-layered struggles that students engage in as they solve mathematics problems together, and that they do so with connections to their practice. This exploratory study offers a starting point for examining how to engage teachers in understanding, and ultimately supporting, students’ complex interactional work during mathematics problem solving.

Authors

• Jennifer Marie Langer-Osuna, Stanford University

• Jen Munson, Northwestern University