"From Teacher Noticing to a Framework for Analyzing and Improving Classroom Lessons"

Santagata, R. (2010). From teacher noticing to a framework for analyzing and improving classroom lessons." In M. Sherin, R. Phillip, & V. Jacobs (Eds.). Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers' eyes. New York: Routledge. 

Abstract

To a certain extent, every teacher engages in acts of noticing. However, there is evidence that expert teachers' noticing skills are more refined than those of novices (Berliner, 2001). For example, when asked to view a series of slides taken in mathematics and science classrooms, expert teachers were able to apply richer schemata than were novices to make sense of the visual information provided. They used their knowledge of classrooms and instructional strategies to focus their attention on important elements of the images and to make multiple hypotheses and interpretations of what they saw. Novice teachers were more hesitant in their descriptions of what was depicted in the images, and their interpretations were not always as accurate and rich as those provided by experts (Carter, Cushing, Sabers, Stein, & Berliner, 1988). Similarly, when viewing videotapes of classroom instruction, expert teachers could monitor, understand, and interpret multiple events occurring in the classroom in more detail and with more insight than novices (Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991).  Because of these differences in expert and novice teachers' abilities to notice, researchers have been interested in investigating ways to improve teachers' noticing skills. I first describe a framework my colleagues and I have used to guide teachers' analysis of teaching and to improve their noticing skills. I then situate this work in the broader field of noticing by highlighting similarities to and differences from others' approaches to teacher noticing. I conclude by summarizing findings about improving teacher-noticing skills from the implementation of our framework in a professional development project with in-service teachers from an urban district.