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

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.

本研究探讨教师对学生思维的关注如何为具有挑战性任务的调整提供依据。对五名实施具有挑战性的数学课程材料达三年或更久的教师进行了教学过程录像，并随后就这些教学过程对他们进行了访谈。结果表明，密切关注学生思维的两名教师对学生思维在教学过程中的发展方式提出了假设，并利用这些假设来指导他们对任务的调整。这些教师将他们的假设与学生策略的细节相联系，从而做出的调整提高了任务的复杂性以及学生接触数学概念的机会。相比之下，主要根据对错来评估学生思维的三名教师，其对任务的调整往往依据他们的观察不足，并且降低了任务的复杂性。研究结果表明，围绕具有挑战性的课程材料的使用形成探究团体，对于为学生提供理解性学习的机会非常重要。