CAREER: Exploring Teacher Noticing of Students' Multimodal Algebraic Thinking

This project investigates and expands teachers' learning to notice in two important ways. First, the research expands beyond teachers' noticing of written and verbal thinking to attend to gesture and other aspects of embodied and multimodal thinking. Second, the project focuses on algebraic thinking and seeks specifically to understand how teacher noticing relates to the content of algebra. Bringing together multimodal thinking and the mathematical ideas in algebra has the potential to support teachers in providing broader access to algebraic thinking for more students.

Full Description

Effective teachers of mathematics attend to and respond to the substance of students' thinking in supporting classroom learning. Teacher professional development programs have supported teachers in learning to notice students' mathematical thinking and using that noticing to make instructional decisions in the classroom. This project investigates and expands teachers' learning to notice in two important ways. First, the research expands beyond teachers' noticing of written and verbal thinking to attend to gesture and other aspects of embodied and multimodal thinking. Second, the project focuses on algebraic thinking and seeks specifically to understand how teacher noticing relates to the content of algebra. Bringing together multimodal thinking and the mathematical ideas in algebra has the potential to support teachers in providing broader access to algebraic thinking for more students.

To study teacher noticing of multimodal algebraic thinking, this project will facilitate video club sessions in which teachers examine and annotate classroom video. The video will allow text-based and visual annotation of the videos to obtain rich portraits of the thinking that teachers notice as they examine algebra-related middle school practice. The research team will create a video library focused on three main algebraic thinking areas: equality, functional thinking, and proportional reasoning. Clips will be chosen that feature multimodal student thinking about these content areas, and provide moments that would be fruitful for advancing student thinking. Two cohorts of preservice teachers will engage in year-long video clubs using this video library, annotate videos using an advanced technological tool, and engage in reflective interviews about their noticing practices. Follow-up classroom observations will be conducted to see how teachers then notice multimodal algebraic thinking in their classrooms. Materials to conduct the video clubs in other contexts and the curated video library will be made available, along with analyses of the teacher learning that resulted from their implementation.

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