Teacher Noticing, Mathematics

Human beings are all involved in acts of noticing and more so in acts of not noticing. These acts of noticing and not noticing are even more critical in matters relating to teaching and learning in the classrooms. What a teacher does in the classroom is highly influenced by what he or she notices about the “blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory data” presented during instruction (Sherin et al. 2011, p. 5). However, the kind of noticing needed by teachers is not a natural extension of being observant in everyday life. Instead, teacher noticing is a form of “professional vision” which comprises “socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group” (Goodwin 1994, p. 606). In addition, teacher noticing can be seen as a set of practices that work together to improve teachers’ sensing to act differently in the classrooms (Mason 2002). Simply put, teacher noticing refers to the specialized ways in which...