Developing a Professional Vision of Mathematics Instruction by Learning to Learn from Teaching

Rossella Santagata, Jennifer Sun, Jessica Tunney, Elizabeth van Es, and Cathery Yeh, from UC Irvine along with Ruthy Fong-Loi, IUSD and Danielle Lopez, NMUSD present at the 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) in Irvine, CA.

Developing a Professional Vision of Mathematics Instruction by Learning to Learn from Teaching

This symposium brings together scholars whose work is focused on developing pre-service teachers’ professional vision of mathematics instruction. Professional vision refers to the ways that individuals are socialized to see one’s profession – to learn to identify and interpret features of one’s practice that are valued by the community of which one seeks to become a part (Goodwin, 1994). In mathematics education, the construct of professional vision has been used to guide studies of teacher noticing. Teacher noticing captures what teachers identify as noteworthy in classroom interactions, how they make sense of and reason about these phenomena and the subsequent decisions they make to inform instruction (see Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011). The field-based component of pre-service teacher education provides a rich context for developing a vision of one’s profession. Prior research finds that structured opportunities to learn to notice and systematically analyze teaching in the context of a course can support pre-service teachers in developing a framework to inform what and how they make sense of classroom interactions (van Es & Sherin, 2002; Santagata, Zannoni, & Stigler, 2007; Santagata & Guarino, 2011). Yet, less is known about the development of pre-service teachers’ vision of instruction as they move through a preparation program and into the early years of teaching; how they draw on skills for noticing and analyzing instruction in systematic ways to guide their observations and analysis once they begin teaching; as well as how interactions with members of the broader system of teacher preparation (e.g. teacher educators, mentor teachers, and supervisors) influence their ways of seeing mathematics instruction. We begin to address these issues in this symposium.