Prospective early childhood teachers’ articulated noticing of mathematics teaching through writing narratives

The study objective was to characterize the noticing teaching skill of prospective early childhood teachers during their practicum (internship period). We explored evidence of noticing in the narratives of prospective early childhood teachers as they learned to describe and analyze specific mathematics teaching situations. The analysis focused on the form and content of the narratives to explore how participants identified the relationships between what was observed in the situations and the interpretations and decisions they made. Three features of how prospective teachers (PTs) framed the teaching situations were determined regarding the relationship between noticing skills and the noticed event: isolated noticing, diffuse noticing and articulated noticing. The findings shed light on the developmental stages of noticing skills in initial early childhood teacher education students.