Developing Antideficit Noticing: Learning to “Prioritize Student Language, Student Thought, and Student Voice”

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

Abstract

Objective or purpose
Teacher education programs often use video analysis tasks to support preservice teachers (PSTs) examine complexities of teaching and learn to notice student thinking (Author, 2015; Chan et al., 2021). Yet, discussions around equitable teaching have often fallen outside of these video analysis tasks. Louie et al. (2021) connects an element of meaningful video analysis – framing – to the existing noticing framework of attending, interpreting, and responding (Jacobs et al., 2010), the FAIR framework. This work offers a lens for exploring how an “anti-deficit frame” (p. 102) can be further integrated into the analysis of video-recorded classroom events , by supporting PSTs in shifting toward anti-deficit noticing.

Theoretical framework
We draw on Louie et al.’s (2021) FAIR framework for anti-deficit noticing because we are interested in tracing shifts in PSTs’ noticing in relation to students more broadly, beyond their disciplinary ideas. By including framing as a component of teacher noticing, the FAIR framework emphasizes the sociopolitical ideologies that influence teacher noticing, a critical lens to help PSTs develop more expansive noticing of students.

Methods and data sources
Participants included math and science PSTs at two US universities. Both programs shared a commitment to equitable education and responsive teaching. Participants were presented with a video analysis task before and after the methods course focal to the study. As part of the post task, the participants reflected on how their noticing changed. We used iterative coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to identify their “change stories,” and used the FAIR framework to characterize their anti-deficit noticing in the video analysis tasks.

Preliminary Findings
The change stories capture how PSTs attended, interpreted, and planned to respond differently to students and content over the semester. Specifically, PSTs attended to correctness in student ideas in the pre-video analysis task and shifted toward “looking for… student strengths,” and to nonverbal ways students express their understanding (e.g. “watch[ing] students’ body language”) in the post-analysis task. PSTs shifted away from interpreting individual student ideas and toward seeing students’ ideas as productive resources for whole class learning. Describing how they would respond to what they noticed was the most explicit area of growth toward utilizing an anti-deficit frame. In the pre-video analysis, PSTs planned to “fix” student ideas or “correct some inconsistent points in their reasoning.” In the post-analysis, PSTs shared that they would “make space” (Haverly et al., 2020) for students to engage in collaborative sensemaking and figure things out together (Authors, 2023b). PSTs explicitly wanted to “decenter” their own voice and “prioritize student language, student thought, and student voice” in their practice.

Significance
Responsive teaching is more than noticing student thinking. It requires noticing students’ strengths and responding by making space to cultivate students’ resources as they engage in collaborative sensemaking. Our study shows that when programs support PSTs in developing an anti-deficit frame, PSTs can use that frame to examine classroom videos, even when unprompted to do so. This is promising for and deserves further exploration of how they use this frame in their teaching.

Authors

• Heather J. Johnson, Vanderbilt University

• Tara Barnhart, Chapman University

• Miray Tekkumru-Kisa, RAND Corporation