In-Service Teachers' Noticing of Productive Struggle During Collaborative Problem-Solving

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 9
  In Poster Session: Mathematics Education Research (San Diego)

Abstract

Opportunities to struggle productively are essential to developing conceptual understanding in mathematics, yet remain more the exception than the norm for many students. If students are to struggle productively, their teachers must be proficient in noticing struggle. Only then might they respond to students in ways that can ensure students’ struggles become productive or remain so. Yet little is known about teachers’ noticing of struggle or those aspects of this complex practice with which teachers might most benefit from support. This qualitative study examined in-service teachers’ noticing of struggle while watching video of students solve challenging problems in collaboration. While teachers attended most to students’ individual, mathematical struggles, following an intervention, they attended increasingly to students’ struggles with group dynamics.

Author

• Michael Jarry-Shore, Boise State University