Novel video tools for teachers to notice nascent algebraic thinking

A School of Education Event hosted by the Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI) 

Presented by Dr Janet Walkoe, University of Maryland, USA

In the complex landscape of K-12 classroom activity, a teacher cannot notice and attend to everything that is happening. What the teacher notices—a student error, off-task behavior, an interesting student idea, etc.—has implications for classroom instruction. Especially as teachers are asked to differentiate instruction for a diverse student body, being attentive and responsive to students’ ideas is an important aspect of teaching that ultimately directs how a lesson unfolds, including who has access and the power to participate. My work takes a close look at domain-specific aspects of noticing. In particular, I investigate teacher noticing of student algebraic thinking.

A growing body of research in early algebra has illustrated that young children have the capacity to reason algebraically and has recommended introducing algebraic ways of thinking in early-elementary grades. Over the past two decades, there have been great strides in exploring children’s capacity for algebraic thinking and this work has opened the door to designing early algebra curricula and classroom experiences. What is less explored, however, are ways to support teachers in implementing early algebra lessons and supporting students’ thinking about early algebra concepts.

In this talk I will discuss two new directions on prior work on noticing. I will introduce an approach to teacher education that leverages a novel algebraic thinking perspective. This perspective allows researchers and teachers to break algebraic competencies down to smaller conceptual bits, one colleagues and I call “seeds of algebraic thinking.” I will demonstrate how leveraging this perspective with novel video annotation tools, can support teachers in identifying and reasoning about students’ nascent algebra thinking.  

Biography

Janet is an Associate Professor in the Center for Mathematics Education (CfME) at the University of Maryland. She earned her Doctorate from Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences in 2013. She also holds an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Before enrolling in graduate school, Janet taught secondary mathematics for ten years and earned National Board Certification in 2003.

Janet's research interests focus on the teaching and learning of algebra. She is interested in both the nature and development of algebraic thinking and ways to design teacher learning experiences that support their noticing of algebraic thinking in the classroom. In particular, she is interested in how teachers can learn to attend to and make sense of student thinking and other student resources including but not limited to student dispositions and students' ways of communicating mathematics.

Janet’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the US Department of Education. Her work appears in journals such as the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, Mathematics Teacher, and the Journal of the Learning Sciences, among others.