Teacher Noticing: Attending To and Interpreting Students’ Mathematical Fluency Through Written and Oral Representations
Keywords:
teacher notcing, mathematical fluency, student mathematical thinkingAbstract
Teacher noticing of students’ thinking is a key component in the development of teaching expertise. The central focus of the study was on investigating teachers’ noticing–attending and interpreting–of mathematical fluency. This article reports on findings from nine primary teachers’ observations of upper primary students during mathematics lessons and their reported noticings in post-lesson group discussions. Teachers’ noticings focused on attending to mathematically important details of students’ strategies which aligns with previous teacher noticing research. The study contributes to the field of teacher noticing by illustrating how the use of a detailed observational tool provided specificity of the mathematical features to attend to, and a common language for discussion. The tool’s emphasis on observing students’ oral and written representations widens the scope of what evidence teachers used to interpret mathematical fluency (differing from how fluency is generally observed via numerical/written responses alone). In this study’s case oral responses were most important; teachers relied heavily on restating student oral responses to interpret their noticings.
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