The Impact of Professional Noticing on Teachers' Adaptations of Challenging Tasks

Abstract

This study investigates how teacher attention to student thinking informs adaptations of challenging tasks. Five teachers who had implemented challenging mathematics curriculum materials for three or more years were videotaped enacting instructional sequences and were subsequently interviewed about those enactments. The results indicate that the two teachers who attended closely to student thinking developed conjectures about how that thinking developed across instructional sequences and used those conjectures to inform their adaptations. These teachers connected their conjectures to the details of student strategies, leading to adaptations that enhanced task complexity and students' opportunity to engage with mathematical concepts. By contrast, the three teachers who evaluated students' thinking primarily as right or wrong regularly adapted tasks in ways that were poorly informed by their observations and that reduced the complexity of the tasks. The results suggest that forming communities of inquiry around the use of challenging curriculum materials is important for providing opportunities for students to learn with understanding.