Using Digital Video to Investigate Teachers’ In-the-Moment Noticing

Understanding teacher cognition – and in particular teacher noticing poses significant challenges to researchers because of the ongoing nature of teaching. To overcome those challenges learning science researchers have used a variety of methods to help them understand how teachers reason and make decisions while teaching. In this symposium we describe a new digital technology that allows teachers to capture short video clips of classroom activity as they are teaching. The three papers explore different aspects of what we have learned about teacher noticing using this new technology. The first paper describes the potential of the camera to serve as a window into teachers’ in-the-moment noticing. The second examines teacher noticing of their students’ thinking. The third paper investigates our efforts to use clips captured using this methodology as the basis for video clubs in which teachers watch and discuss excerpts of one another’s classrooms.