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In this article we describe secondary school practising teachers’ professional noticing expertise, which includes (a) attending to the details of students' written or verbal responses, (b) interpreting students' mathematical understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond to students based on their understandings, with a focus on algebraic-pattern generalisation. Quantitative results indicated that the majority of teachers in our study provided evidence that they could attend to the mathematical details of students' thinking. However, the practising secondary school teachers provided less evidence of interpreting students' understandings, and even less of deciding how to respond to students based on those understandings. We present qualitative trends to help mathematics professional developers prepare for the teachers they will support and discuss how these trends might influence work with secondary school practising teachers on noticing student thinking in pattern-generalisation tasks.
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Changes in practicing secondary teachers’ professional noticing over a long-term professional development program
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 professional- noticing 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-to- respond 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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1240127
- PAR ID:
- 10222514
- Editor(s):
- Sacristán, A.I.; Cortés-Zavala, J.C.; & Ruiz-Arias, P.M.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education
- Volume:
- Sacristán, A.I., Cortés-Zavala, J.C. & Ruiz-Arias, P.M.
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1818 to 1827
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.51272/pmena.42.2020-297
