Noticing for Equity: Teacher Collaboration Around Student Work

• In Event: “Noticing for Equity”: What Is It, and How Can It Be Developed?

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines how participation in teacher collaboration around student work entails and promotes teachers’ noticing for equity. We examine how taking a strengths-based lens on student thinking promotes more expansive views of students and their participation toward equitable aims.

Theoretical framework
Recent research on noticing for equity has identified strengths-based lenses on student mathematical thinking as essential to disrupt persistent deficit discourses around students’ performance (Jilk, 2016; Kalinec-Craig et al., 2021; Discussant, 2023). In addition to recognizing students’ brilliance and diverse ways of knowing as resources for mathematics learning, noticing for equity also includes recognizing students’ histories of participation and valuing their interests and cultural practices (Author et al., 2022). Analyzing students' work outside of the classroom allows teachers space to interpret students’ mathematical reasoning and reflect on their opportunities to learn (Goldsmith & Seago, 2011; Leshin, 2023). We propose that as teachers collaborate around student work, they narrate their noticing of multiple dimensions of classroom phenomena, which has implications for sustaining equitable learning opportunities for historically marginalized students.

Methods and data
Data includes audio-recorded meetings of two elementary grade-level teams who met weekly to analyze student work. This work is part of a Research-Practice Partnership. The first author facilitated one team. Qualitative analysis began by coding idea units, or shifts in conversation topic, for dimensions of noticing for equity including student thinking, participation, language use, and histories. In the next round, we analyzed segments coded student thinking to identify whether teachers used an uncommitted, deficit, mixed, or strengths-based lens (Kalinec-Craig et al., 2021). In the final round of analysis, we characterized how using a strength-based lens coincided with noticing of students’ histories of participation and valuing their interests and cultural practices (Author et al., 2022).

Results
Preliminary analysis suggests that when teachers maintain a strengths-based lens on student thinking, this often occurs with genuine curiosity about students’ mathematical ideas. As teachers grapple to understand students’ strategies, they narrate how students’ ideas differ from their own, illustrating a respect for their students’ intellectual work and a willingness to share mathematical authority. Moreover, when teachers notice using a strengths-based lens, they situate that noticing within their knowledge of students’ participation during the lesson and across time, positioning students as valuable contributors to the classroom community. For example, as teachers narrate a specific strategy seen in written work, they also describe how the student shared the strategy with others during the lesson to build whole class understanding.

Significance
Preliminary findings suggest that using a strengths-based lens on student thinking creates opportunities for more expansive noticing toward equitable aims in terms of sharing mathematical authority and participation. However, without explicit scaffolds, a strengths-based lens on student thinking is not enough to generate robust noticing of students’ cultural practices as valuable to the classroom community. Findings contribute to an understanding of how routine and sustained analysis of student work can serve to develop teachers’ noticing for equity and as a remedy to repair existing inequities in mathematics classrooms.

Authors

• Christina Kimmerling, University of California - Irvine

• Patricia Fuentes Acevedo, University of California - Irvine

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine