Search for: All records

Gaining insight into how one’s noticing shapes decision-making can enable a teacher to reflect on how they frame, interpret, and respond to classroom activity and disrupt the influence of dominant ideologies. Working in the context of teacher education, we conjectured that systematically analyzing and reflecting on their own noticing can enable preservice teachers (PSTs) in mathematics to develop more equitable practices. Using data from summative assignments in a course on advancing equitable teaching, we investigate how PSTs use lenses of equitable teaching to make sense of their noticing and develop conceptions of equity. Analysis reveals that PSTs engaged in meaningful reflection and adopted terms from the course but avoided discussing the sociopolitical dimensions of instruction. These findings have implications for course design and facilitation in the context of developing PSTs’ noticing for equity. 

Effective teaching relies on practices of reflection and inquiry that must be cultivated throughout teachers’ careers. Professional development (PD) can support those practices by positioning participants to develop and build on insights. Using data from a PD program focused on teacher noticing for equity, we draw on practice theory to identify the process and associated practices that emerged through participation in collaborative inquiry. Analysis reveals three phases of activity, consisting of interrelated practices that drove insight-based learning: building awareness, collaborative exploration, and learning through design. Through engaging in this process, participants made unconscious aspects of teaching visible that allowed participants to deepen and expand their insights, and through design, articulated new insights and situated their learning back in the context of their teaching. These findings have implications for designing PD that prioritizes participants’ agency to cultivate practices of reflection and inquiry. 

Efforts to transform educational systems advocate for shifting and expanding the voices of those who generate research. This study was part of a project that brought together mathematics teachers, youth workers, and researchers to create equity-centered noticing frameworks for mathematics instruction. We explore youth workers’ understandings of the relationship between local educational equity problems and larger structural forces. By applying the framework of critical bifocality, we explore how youth workers demonstrate praxis where their pedagogical responses are animated by an under- standing of the inherent linkages between broad social, economic, and political forces and educational equity issues in the local community.