Exploring Teacher Educators' Selection of Critical Events to Support Noticing for Equity

• In Event: What Constitutes Teacher Noticing of Critical Events?

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives
Teacher noticing research reveals how teachers’ sociopolitical histories shape their attention and sense-making during instruction (Authors, 2021; Louie, 2018). To cultivate more humanizing and just mathematics classrooms requires understanding how teachers develop awareness of the relationship between their noticing and enactment of classroom practices that serve to marginalize students from culturally, linguistically, and racially minoritized communities. We examine how a professional development program that emerged through a community-based participatory design (Zeichner et al., 2016) centered the “noticing interview” as a central context for developing awareness of one’s noticing and ways to expand, hone, or disrupt one’s noticing for equity. In this study, we analyze what consituted noteworthy phenomena in classroom instruction and how the selected segments for the interview provoked teachers’ generating new insights for equitable mathematics teaching (Kennedy, 2016).
We theorize teacher learning as formulating new theoretical concepts and generating insights through reflection and analysis of practice (Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Mason, 2009). Research identifies various ways teachers can generate insights - through narrating, renarrating, and reenvisioning practice (Philip, 2019), co-design activities (Authors, 2022c), and lesson analysis (Santagata & Yeh, 2014), which each position teachers to focus on particular aspects of practice for inquiry. We aim to identify features of segments that researchers selected as critical events of equitable teaching that provoked teachers’ forming new concepts about how their noticing served to disrupt and perpetuate patterns of inequities in mathematics classrooms.
Study Context, Data, and Methods
This study takes place in the context of a professional development program co-designed and implemented with secondary mathematics teachers in 2021-22. Data includes three separate videorecorded lessons and associated noticing interviews for nine teachers. The researchers selected segments from each observation and conducted a “noticing interview” where teachers shared what they focused on and why in these interactions that supported the observed equitable practices. Data includes the selected segments, teachers’ commentary, and researchers’ notes on the segment selection. We report on a qualitative analysis of the researchers’ notes, and teachers’ commentary to identify how features of clips provoke teachers’ learning and awareness of patterns in their noticing.
Results and Significance
Our preliminary analysis identifies features of segments and how they are situated in the noticing interview to provoke new insights. These include: a) constitute routine and mundane classroom activity; b) located in students’ histories; and c) sequenced to reveal patterns of attention (see Table 1). In the larger paper, we elaborate each feature and present example cases to illuminate how these features provoked self-awareness and identified openings for expanding teachers’ noticing to further equitable instruction.
This work contributes to research on designing professional development that makes visible to teachers aspects of their teaching and themselves as teachers that shapes instructional decisions. It also contributes to research that aims to identify features of professional learning activity systems (Authors, 2009, 2020) that can support teachers’ learning to notice.

Authors

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

• Alison K. Munzer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ethan Rubin, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jose Angel Mendez, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author