Toward Defining a Noticing Discourse

• In Event: Theorizing Teachers' Situated Talk to Disrupt Inequitable Instructional Practice

Abstract

Purpose
In video-based professional development (PD), teachers develop knowledge and practices to attend to the substance of students’ ideas in order to respond to advance students’ learning (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015). Yet we know little about the mechanisms of teacher learning in PD (Lefstein et al., 2020). Given the importance of noticing in the work of teaching (Kersting et al., 2012), and the power of video to support teachers’ learning to notice, we explore how discourse in video-based PD serves as a mechanism for teachers’ learning. We theorize the emergence of a noticing discourse that supports both teachers’ learning to notice and their enactment of noticing in practice.

Theoretical Perspectives
We adopt a situative perspective to study teacher learning (Putnam & Borko, 2000) and assume knowledge and understanding are co-constructed through joint processes of interaction in activity systems (Greeno, 2011). Like others (e.g. Horn & Kane, 2019), we see PD as discourse-rich interactional spaces where teachers engage with each other and tools to reason about instructional practice.
We draw on teacher noticing research (Sherin et al., 2011) and professional learning discourse (Author, 2020b) to advance a noticing discourse framework. We conceptualize teachers’ learning in PD as learning a discourse that is generative for both teacher learning and enacting responsive teaching. We conjecture that what teachers learn in video-based PD is not only to notice the nuance and complexity of the substance of student thinking (Walkoe, 2015), but also a form of discourse that supports enactment of noticing in practice.

Study Context, Data, and Methods
We analyzed three discussion segments from video club data reported elsewhere (Author, 2008). To define a noticing discourse, we turned to our data for evidence of discourse that served to support teachers learning to notice, asking: What makes talk productive for teachers in a learning to notice PD context?

For each segment, we wrote analytic memos capturing the discourse practices specifically connected to talk and activity surrounding teachers' noticing. From these memos, we examined how participants’ use of discourse practices supported attending to and interpreting students’ ideas. We then looked across our findings to determine the features of generative talk that we think defines a noticing discourse.

Results
We identified four features of a noticing discourse: (a) negotiating noteworthy phenomena, (b) problematizing objects of teaching and learning, (c) being accountable to evidence, and (d) positioning students' ideas as resources (elaborated in Table 1). In the larger paper, we elaborate each feature and present a vignette from a video club discussion to illustrate the discourse practices that were enacted towards defining a noticing discourse.

Significance
This work contributes to the limited research on mechanisms of teacher learning and advances our conjecture that teachers learn to take up a noticing discourse to support the enactment of attending to and interpreting students’ ideas. We see promise in defining the forms of talk that supported teacher learning, to understand how to design and facilitate PD supporting teachers developing responsive teaching practices that position students’ ideas as the objects of inquiry.

Authors

• Melissa J. Luna, West Virginia University
  Presenting Author

• Miray Tekkumru-Kisa, RAND Corporation
  Presenting Author

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