Noticing Student Thinking as a Resource for Equitable Mathematics Instruction

• In Event: Noticing and Responding to Student Thinking for Equity

Abstract

Objective or purpose
Teacher noticing of student mathematical thinking is central to creating discourse-rich, responsive classrooms that increase student learning opportunities (Authors, 2012a; Blomeke et al., 2015). Noticing student thinking entails attending to and reasoning about student errors and novel ideas, and creating interactions that enable teachers to gain deeper insight into student thinking during instruction (Authors, 2021b). We investigate whether noticing student thinking also contributes to disrupting power relations to expand identities available to culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse students.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
We draw on Gutiérrez’s (2009; 2012) equity framework that consists of the dominant and critical axes to consider how teachers can take an equity lens to notice student thinking. Noticing student thinking has been critiqued for focusing on student cognition to advance student access and achievement (Louie, 2018) and neglecting the broader sociopolitical context of mathematics classrooms in which student learning is situated. We propose that noticing student thinking, however, can advance the two dimensions of the critical axis – power and identity – by supporting teachers attending to who is contributing, how their ideas are positioned and taken up in the classroom, and how attending to students’ identities and their ideas can shift power relationships among students and between the teacher and students in the classroom.

Methods and data sources
Data comes from two different video-based professional development programs – one focused on noticing student thinking and the other on noticing for equity – in which teachers viewed and discussed video segments in interview and group contexts. Segments featured substantive student thinking (Authors, 2009) and teachers enacting positive relational interactions to advance equity (Authors, 2022a; Battey & Neal, 2018). We identified segments across both contexts that met the criteria of critical events for student and teacher learning (Rotem & Ayalon, 2022; Van Zoest et al., 2017). Informed by Schwarz et al. (2021), we coded the interviews and group discussions for teachers’ attending, interpreting, and shaping of student mathematical thinking (Authors, 2021b) and then coded teachers’ commentary on these moments to characterize their attention to students’ identities and the potential to assign agency through noticing students’ ideas.

Results
Preliminary analysis shows that teachers’ who created positive relational interactions attended to the content and substance of student thinking and who contributed ideas, with particular attention to elevating student thinking for students who had been traditionally marginalized in mathematics (e.g. emergent bilingual learners). In addition, teachers interpreted students’ thinking in terms of its mathematical relevance, as well as from anti-deficit perspectives. Finally, teachers shaped interactions to learn more from students about their thinking and to determine how to assign them more agency in the classroom.

Significance
These findings suggest that focusing on the substance of student thinking can serve as a resource for creating more equitable classroom interactions. These findings have implications for research that advocates for students from historically marginalized groups to have access to high quality mathematics instruction and specialized discourses (Brantlinger, 2022), by demonstrating how centering student thinking can expand student agency and authority in the classroom.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Miriam G. Sherin, Northwestern University