A Framework for Learning to Notice Student Thinking

Classrooms are complex settings, with a variety of interactions taking place at one time. Teachers need to decide to what to pay attention, and they need to reason about what they see to make decisions about how to proceed with the lesson. But learning to what events and interactions to pay attention is a complicated skill. First, teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning, students, content, and curriculum all influence to what they attend while they teach. Second, to draw conclusions that particular teaching strategies are effective, one needs to know what counts as evidence for effective practice. Teachers often use student behavioral cues as evidence that their teaching methods were effective, but adopting cognitive perspectives to make claims about effective teaching is equally important. However, conducting such analysis proves to be a challenge because American teachers do not typically design or enact lessons in ways that provide them with windows into the development of student thinking and understanding (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).