Dr. van Es's research investigates how professional development and teacher education systems work to actually impact both future and practicing teachers
Irvine, Calif., July, 2008
Elizabeth (Beth) van Es is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include teacher learning and designs of professional development and pre-service teacher education to help teachers learn to teach for understanding and to develop a student-centered pedagogy. In particular, she is interested in how video can be used to help teachers learn to "notice" - to pay attention to and reason about student thinking during instruction. Recently, she was awarded a fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation to investigate how to help pre-service secondary mathematics teachers learn to observe and analyze their own and other's teaching in order to develop this critical skill of noticing.
Dr. van Es earned her B.A. in the Teaching of English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1992 and her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University in 2004. Prior to entering graduate school, she was a high school English and Communication teacher. During her four years teaching, she embraced ways to integrate technology into the classroom and led professional development sessions around this topic. She searched for a graduate program that focused on technology and education and enrolled in the Learning Sciences master's degree program at Northwestern University. Not only did she learn about cutting edge technologies in this program, but she also encountered educational theories that transformed her thinking about teaching and learning.
During her master's program, her interests shifted to teacher education, particularly related to what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to teach for understanding. She continued her graduate studies to pursue this interest; and, drawing on her experience using technology in education, she turned to investigate how video can be used to help mathematics teachers learn to notice student thinking. She explains,
When I entered graduate school, the math education community was talking about how to develop a discourse community in the classroom and how to help teachers learn to do that. Coming from a discipline that is very much grounded in discussion of text [English & Communication], I thought I could bring this perspective to teacher education research in mathematics. Ultimately, what I hope to do is contribute to the literature an understanding of what it means to notice across content areas. What does it mean to notice student thinking in mathematics, science, and language arts? What is similar and different about this construct across disciplines?
Answers to these questions would help inform the design of teacher education and professional development for teachers across disciplines.
Dr. van Es's true passion lies in understanding how professional development and teacher education systems work to actually impact both future and practicing teachers. She explains, All too often professional development is short-term and disconnected from the actual work of teaching. Even programs that are based on principles of effective professional development do not ensure teacher learning or changes in teaching practice. Important questions center around understanding how professional development functions as a system - how the facilitators, participants, and tools in the environment and the interactions that occur between them - influence teacher learning. Therefore, she conducts research that allows her to ask questions about how things work - how people work together, how technological tools and resources are used to support learning, and how programs are designed to facilitate learning.
More recently, Dr. van Es's interests have shifted from practicing teachers to investigate pre-service teachers' learning to notice. With her Knowles Fellowship, she will design and study a teacher education course intended specifically to help future teachers learn to observe their own and others' teaching. The goal is to help them develop their noticing skills by watching video records of practice and by viewing and reflecting on their own teaching.
The central questions that Dr. van Es studies in her research include:
- How do pre-service teachers learn to observe and reflect on their own teaching? How do they learn to notice student thinking?
- What developmental trajectories exist for learning to attend to student thinking, particularly from pre-service through the induction years of teaching?
- What do teachers pay attention to while teaching? How can video be used to help teachers pay attention to student thinking? How can video analysis of student thinking help teachers develop practices for inquiring into student thinking that they can employ in the classroom?
