Teacher noticing of student thinking represents a key aspect of teacher expertise as it informs teachers’ actions ‘on the fly’ during a lesson. In science and mathematics education, teacher noticing has been conceptualised as being driven by attending to and making sense of student thinking. A range of models of noticing developed in professional fields such as aviation posit that perceptual interaction is also a key driver of noticing. This paper presents an alternate, ecological model of teacher noticing that begins with the premise that teachers have limited capacity to make sense of noteworthy events mid-lesson. Multimodal data collected from a primary science and mathematics lesson, taught by the same teacher, is analysed using the ecological lens. The analysis draws research attention to aspects of teacher/classroom interaction such as attention deployment and the role that classroom environments play in facilitating mid-lesson noticing of student thinking. Differences in teacher noticing between the science and mathematics lesson can be accounted for in terms of variance in environmental structure rather than solely in terms of teacher cognition.
Most studies of mathematics teacher noticing employ information-processingbased models of noticing. While information processing has been used productively to research the cognitive requirements of noticing, critics have argued that these accounts conceptualise noticing as a relatively passive and mental act. This paper demonstrates how an alternative perception/action cycle model of noticing can draw attention to how teacher noticing is supported by active interaction with the classroom environment mid-lesson. Data from two primary mathematics lessons were gathered using a head-mounted camera technique. These data are analysed using the perception/action cycle model to demonstrate the model's capacity to enable productive research. The model draws attention to aspects of teacher behaviour that support noticing that are given little weight when information processing informs analysis. By contrasting the noticing of one experienced and one beginning teacher, differences in the way that each teacher deployed their attention and looked for information mid-lesson can be ascertained. The experienced teacher took action that increased the likelihood that students would create mathematical representations that enabled perception of students' mathematical thinking and deployed their attention so that they were more likely to be in the right place at the right time to notice. The perception/action cycle model draws attention to these under-researched aspects of mathematics teacher noticing.
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