An asset-based perspective on prospective teacher education

Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, 2019

Journal of Practitioner Research, 2020

Prospective elementary mathematics teachers (PTs) were asked to analyze 28 videos of cognitive interviews. The purpose of this study was to determine if experiences analyzing videos would lead to improvements in PTs’ professional noticing skills. Using a coding schema that reflected three levels of understanding (periphery, transitional, and accomplished), a frequency table was constructed that allowed PTs’ use and understanding of a noticing framework to be analyzed. Findings indicate that experiences analyzing videos leads to improvements in PTs’ professional noticing skills.

PMENA, 2021

Being able to notice students' mathematical thinking during teaching (in-the-moment noticing, IMN) impacts the quality of instruction. Also, noticing students' mathematical thinking and reflecting on the activities of teaching after instruction (post-instruction noticing, PIN) is important for teachers' long-term professional development. We explored the relationships between IMN and PIN by examining the data from seven elementary in-service teachers engaged in a professional development program. By analyzing 33 coaching videos and post-coaching conversations, we found that teachers' IMN did not align with their PIN, and PIN tended to be of lower quality than IMN. We discuss implications for future research and practice.

Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft

Teacher noticing has become widely accepted as a principal component of teacher competence; it is supported during university teacher education in many activities. However, only a few high-quality standardized measurement instruments exist that capture noticing and allow valid interpretations of how its development depends on factors within university teacher education. The present study is based on a video-based test instrument that has been developed to enable a standardized study of the noticing of practicing mathematics teachers—that is, their perception, interpretation, and decision-making skills—with respect to subject-specific and general pedagogical issues in secondary mathematics classrooms. This study examines how this instrument developed for in-service teachers can be used for pre-service teachers at the master’s degree level. Based on a sample of 313 pre-service mathematics teachers enrolled in six German universities, the study investigates (1) the instrument’s interna...

This study investigates how teacher attention to student thinking informs adaptations of challenging tasks. Five teachers who had implemented challenging mathematics curriculum materials for three or more years were videotaped enacting instructional sequences and were subsequently interviewed about those enactments. The results indicate that the two teachers who attended closely to student thinking developed conjectures about how that thinking developed across instructional sequences and used those conjectures to inform their adaptations. These teachers connected their conjectures to the details of student strategies, leading to adaptations that enhanced task complexity and students' opportunity to engage with mathematical concepts. By contrast, the three teachers who evaluated students' thinking primarily as right or wrong regularly adapted tasks in ways that were poorly informed by their observations and that reduced the complexity of the tasks. The results suggest that forming communities of inquiry around the use of challenging curriculum materials is important for providing opportunities for students to learn with understanding.

Mathematics Education Across Cultures: Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 2020

Much of the research on the development of professional noticing expertise has focused on prospective teachers. We contend that we must investigate practicing teachers as well, and in particular practicing secondary teachers, because they bring with them years of teaching experience and are situated in unique contexts. Hence we studied the longitudinal growth of the professionalnoticing expertise of a group of practicing secondary teachers (N=10) as they progressed through a 5-year professional development (PD) about being responsive to students' mathematical thinking. Results indicated that the first half of the PD supported their interpreting and deciding-how-torespond skills, and the second half of the PD supported their attending skills, which were already strong even before the PD. We compare these results with the activities that occurred in the PD and discuss implications for future research and PD programs.

2010

Theoretical constructs are the cornerstones on which the advancement of any field rests. Constructs are not valued simply in terms of whether they are right or wrong; instead, they are valued by their usefulness to the field. Occasionally a construct emerges that transforms the field by enabling researchers to reconceptualize their endeavors and to shift, sometimes in subtle ways, the focus of their attention. Such constructs may not be entirely novel. They may be consistent with previous ideas and yet bring to light new research questions and new methodological approaches. Pedagogical content knowledge is one such example. Pedagogical content knowledge appeared quite suddenly with the publication by Lee Shulman (1987) of "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform." However, the core insight behind pedagogical content knowledge goes back at least 100 years (Dewey, 1902, 1904/1964). The idea that teachers might possess knowledge about teaching that is specific to subject matter cannot have been entirely foreign to researchers reading Shulman's article. Nonetheless, Shulman's introduction of this construct significantly changed the field, and, although the introduction of pedagogical content knowledge faced obstacles, the change was dramatic enough to drive decades of research on teaching and to influence the preparation of a generation of teachers. This book is dedicated to another construct in teaching that we call teacher noticing. Perhaps it is an accident, or perhaps the time is just right, but, across institutions, researchers in teacher education have begun to describe their work as being about teacher noticing. Those researching teacher noticing ask what are, in some respects, primal questions of teaching: Where do teachers look, what do they see, and what sense do they make of what they see? Although these questions are relevant to teaching in any domain, this book is focused on noticing as a component of teaching expertise in mathematics.

Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 2016

2004

1985

The authors claim that the principal contribution of research on teacher thinking is enrichment of understanding of what teachers know and what teaching entails. Studies of teacher planning, decision making, knowledge, and theorizing can be used to provide prospective teachers with a realistically complex picture of the cognitive aspects of teaching. This research also supports the development of a conception of teaching as a reflectively professional enterprise. For both novices and experienced teachers the proposed goals of applying this research are to promote understanding of teaching as a design profession and to empower teachers in self-directed professional development efforts. Knowledge about how teachers get their work done is of worth to teachers not because it will provide them with new tools to use, but rather because it changes the way researchers view what teachers need to know; researchers can then be of more help to teachers. Descriptions of teaching that have been produced by studies of teacher thinking can help to provide a framework for researchers to decide what sorts of information, advice, and support will be useable in the classroom.