Researcher to Investigate Pre-service Teachers' "Noticing" Skills
Assistant Professor Elizabeth van Es has received a Council on Research Computing and Libraries (CORCL) Single Investigator Award for a study entitled "Investigating the Nature of University Supervisor’s 'Noticing' of Classroom Lessons." Dr. van Es's research foci include teacher cognition, professional development, and teacher learning communities.
Research Summary
An important part of learning to teach is learning to observe and analyze classroom lessons. This study is concerned with how to help future teachers develop skills at analyzing teaching, what I call noticing. One important context for learning to notice is through interactions with university supervisors. The role of the supervisor is to observe\ pre-service teachers student teaching and provide feedback and commentary on their practice. Essentially, the supervisors’ practice is noticing teaching and pointing out to prospective teachers what is worthy of attending to and how to make sense of the complexity of teaching. Thus, this study seeks to investigate the following questions: a) What do supervisors pay attention to when they analyze classroom lessons?; b) How do they reason about what they notice?; and c) What and how do they communicate to student teachers the important dimensions of teaching to attend to?
