UC San Diego

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have invigorated a large push towards the expectation that students should engage in science as scientists do. This requires teachers to have the skills necessary to able to hear and engage with their students’ science ideas. The current study draws from two constructs, teacher professional noticing and responsive teaching. Noticing includes; attending, interpreting, and responding to students’ ideas (Jacobs et al., 2010). Similarly, responsive teaching includes; elicitation, interpretation, and following-up to students’ in-the-moment thinking (Levin et al., 2009). Richards and Robertson (2016) suggest noticing is a precursor to responsive teaching, however, no empirical study examines this relationship.The current study takes place in the context of a larger study, the Noyce Project LEARN Master Teacher Fellowship, a five-year professional development program (PD) for 32 practicing mathematics and science teachers. This program had an explicit focus on students’ mathematics and science ideas. Using two professional noticing tasks collected during the PD program, I identified three science teachers who increased in their capacity to engage in noticing skills over the five-year period. Classroom video was collected annually from each teacher, and I used discourse analysis, namely redirections (Lineback, 2014), to examine teachers’ responsiveness to students’ scientific thinking. While I found minimal evidence for teacher responsiveness, I found a high presence of not responsive activity redirections. These occur when a teacher makes a comment or poses a question which shifts the activity, not in response to a student idea. I identified five not responsive activity redirections in my dataset; 1) whole class discussion, 2) developing/revising explanations/models, 3) surface level tasks, 4) small groups/partner discussions, and 5) conducting observations/investigations. When comparing the noticing task and classroom video, I noted a relationship in the types of not responsive activity redirections teachers engaged in and increased complexity teachers describe similar activities in the noticing task. While I did not observe evidence between growth in noticing skills and responsiveness, I have begun to illustrate the relationship between these constructs. Future research should expand the redirections coding framework to account for teacher redirections that occur during small group work, as this may indicate higher responsiveness in secondary classrooms.