Mathematical Opportunities: Noticing and Acting

Abstract

Recent studies on the improvement of quality of teaching and learning revealed that teachers should act as a facilitator, coach or guide to foster students’ knowledge and skills. However, teachers’ professional knowledge and skills is one of the determinants of how effectively they can act in accordance with such roles in a classroom setting. To support the development of both pre-service and in-service teachers’ professional skills is thought as a valuable attempt to improve the effectiveness of teaching in schools. Therefore, under a university-school collaboration program, we provided an opportunity for pre-service mathematics teachers to work with students throughout a year and we investigated their pedagogical content knowledge and noticing skills. We aimed to determine whether or not pre-service teachers attended to mathematical opportunities occurred while interacting with students and we analyzed how they responded to those opportunities. In this paper we discussed their responding actions through two sample instances. Such an analysis is likely to contribute to the relevant literature in terms of identifying the nature of pre-service teachers’ in-the-moment noticing as well as evaluating their responding actions for mathematical opportunities.