Secondary Prospective Mathematics Teachers Learning to Notice

Dawn Teuscher, Tenille Cannon, and Sharon Christensen recently published an article titled “Secondary prospective mathematics teachers learning to notice: The need for a dual perspective of teaching” in School, Science and Mathematics. Dawn has answered a few questions about this article below:

Who would you say is the target audience for this article?

Mathematics Teacher Educators - specifically pre-service teacher educators

What is the big problem you hoped to address with this article?

Research indicates that pre-service teachers notice many things in a classroom. We wanted to identify how secondary pre-service teachers were noticing during class debriefing to see if this would give us (teacher educators) ways of incorporating and helping pre-service teachers notice important things within a lesson.

What are some of the key ideas in the article?

One key finding is that there are two perspectives that pre-service teachers need to move between as they are teaching. Most pre-service teachers are very familiar with the student perspective, which is what they have been doing for the past 14-16 years as a student in many different classrooms. However, they need to shift to a teacher perspective so they can connect their student perspective to the teaching goals and purposes of the lesson.

A second key finding is that pre-service teachers who are planning and teaching lessons to their peers are able to transition to a dual perspective of student and teacher within mathematics and curriculum, but it is more difficult for them to transition to the teacher perspective with pedagogy.

What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from this article?

That pre-service teachers need to have opportunities throughout their program learning how to move between a teacher lens and a student lens. These two perspectives are important as they plan and implement lessons. Therefore, having opportunities to practice moving between these lenses are important in their development of teachers.

Abstract:

The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators recommends that well-prepared beginning mathematics teachers apply their understanding of mathematics, curriculum, pedagogy, student learners and social constructions to facilitate mathematics learning for all students. Using the context of a secondary methods course, where prospective mathematics teachers (PMTs) participate in six teaching cycles of peer taught lessons we analyzed lesson debriefings of PMTs questions and comments to determine what PMTs notice over the course of the semester and how their noticing changed based on their role as a teaching or peer PMT. Analysis of these data reveal that participating in both roles as student and teacher provided PMTs with different opportunities to connect the teaching elements (i.e., curriculum, mathematics, pedagogy). Using these data we present an observed learning trajectory for secondary PMTs that mathematics teacher educators can use as they design learning activities within their methods class to promote PMTs to begin to notice the dual (student/teacher) perspective.