Perspectives on Noticing in the Preparation of Elementary Mathematics Teachers

The development of practice is at the heart of educational programs for pre-service teachers and professional development opportunities for educational professionals. A key focus of this work is to ‘make sense’ of the classroom including students’ thinking, discussions, and work so that this sense making provides useful contexts and information for the teacher to interpret as a basis for instructional decisions. This idea of ‘making sense’ is replete with different perspectives on exactly what it means to make sense. Noticing is a process that provides an approach to this sense making. In this chapter, van Es and Sherin’s (J Technol Teacher Educ 10:571–596, 2002) definition explicated through three critical components of noticing will be used to better understand how noticing supports pre-service mathematics teachers make sense of the complexity of classroom events. These three components are (a) identifying what is important or noteworthy about a classroom situation; (b) making connections between the specifics of classroom interactions and the broader principles of teaching and learning they represent; and (c) using what one knows about the context to reason about classroom interactions (p. 573).