PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Fostering teacher change through increased noticing: Creating authentic opportunities for teachers to reflect on student thinking
Page: 1192
This paper reports results from a case study focusing on a secondary teacher’s sense-making as she was challenged to reinterpret her meanings for algebraic symbols and processes. Building from these opportunities, she redesigned lessons to gather information about how her students conceptualized quantities and how they thought of variables, terms, and expressions as representing those quantities’ values. She then used this information to respond productively to her understanding of individual students’ meanings and reasoning elicited during these lessons. We argue that this case study demonstrates the potential for coordinating quantitative reasoning with teacher noticing as a lens to support teacher learning and we recommend specific mathematical practices that can help teachers develop more focused noticing of students’ mathematical meanings during instruction.