Professional noticing coherence: exploring relationships between component processes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teacher noticing and related variants have ascended in prominence among the mathematics education research community. While the component processes of such noticing (e.g., attending, interpreting and deciding) have been cast as interrelated, capturing the relationships amongst the components has been more elusive. We focused on the component processes of teacher noticing with particular attention given to interrelatedness. Specifically, we were interested in how and the extent to which the component processes of professional noticing (attending, interpreting, deciding) are thematically connected when preservice elementary teachers are engaged in an assessment approximating professional noticing. We refer to this thematic linkage in this paper as coherence. Our findings suggest a complex interplay between the creation and continuation of themes when enacting professional noticing, and the quality of such noticing.