Toward Professional Development for Multimodal Teacher Noticing

Abstract

Considerable research has been conducted on the critical role of gesture and action in children’s mathematical thinking. However, teacher professional development (PD) has not tended to include specific supports for attending to nonverbal student thinking. In this Brief Report, we argue for including supports for multimodal teacher noticing in teacher PD. We illustrate how a targeted intervention can relatively quickly support teachers in learning to notice multimodal student thinking and demonstrate how shifting teachers’ attention to gesture can enrich how they interpret the details of students’ thinking.