Learning to Notice Student Thinking: Developing Pre-Service Teachers' Professional Vision of Ambitious Mathematics Instruction

Abstract

The ability to attend to and reason about student thinking has been identified as an important aspect in mathematics teaching. Classrooms are complex settings. In the moment of teaching, teachers make choices about what to attend to and they reason about what they observe – what I refer to as noticing - and they use this knowledge to inform their instructional decisions. The expert-novice literature shows that expert teachers are skilled at noticing student thinking and using what they learn to make informed pedagogical moves and that this is less typical for novice teachers. Given the importance of “noticing” in current visions of ambitious instruction, an important question is whether pre-service teachers can learn to notice student thinking and develop an orientation to teaching that is more student-centered early in their careers. In this talk, I will discuss a video-based pre-service teacher education course designed to scaffold pre-service teachers to learn to notice student thinking, to examine student ideas with respect to mathematics learning goals, and to examine the influence of particular teaching moves on student thinking and learning. I will share data from two cohorts of pre-service teachers’ analyses of teaching – one that participated in the video-based course and another that did not – and discuss what they attended to in their teaching and used as evidence for developing students understanding of mathematical concepts, procedures, and reasoning. Findings from this study will offer a framework for designing video-based instruction for pre-service mathematics teachers and can inform the design of teacher education programs that seek to prepare teachers to teach mathematics for understanding.