Amador, J., Males, L. M., Earnest, D., & Dietiker, L. (2017). Curricular noticing: Theory on and practice of teachers’ curricular use. In E. O. Schack, M. H. Fisher, & J. A. Wilhelm (Eds.), Teacher noticing: Bridging and broadening perspectives, contexts, and frameworks (pp. 447-443). Springer: Cham, Switzerland
This chapter presents a new theoretical construct, curricular noticing, used to understand how teachers interact with curriculum materials, and shares findings from four coordinated research studies. Curricular noticing draws from work on professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking and is defined as how teachers make sense of the complexity of content and pedagogical opportunities in written or digital curricular materials. This construct is situated within existing literature on curriculum use, documenting growing concerns about teachers’ curricular reasoning and decision-making. Taken together, these studies explore the curricular noticing of 62 preservice teachers (PSTs) in elementary and secondary mathematics methods courses at four institutions. Participants engaged in one of two aspects of noticing: (a) attending and interpreting in the context of particular tasks; or (b) noticing (attend, interpret and respond) in the context of multiple published curricula. Data include pre/post measures, video of interventions, and written assignments that were collected and qualitatively analyzed. Dimensions of curricular noticing highlight the importance of noticing at the task level and raise questions around curricular sequencing and comparisons of curricula. Findings imply that PSTs would benefit from evaluating curriculum materials using specifically designed analysis tools, and highlight the importance of curricular noticing as a framing for understanding PSTs practices with curricula.
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2019