0:00  
Hello and thank you for listening to the mathematics teacher educator journal podcast. The mathematics teacher educator journal is co sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. My name is Eva Sennheiser, and I'm talking with Dr. Sarah roller, who is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, in the College of Education and the Department of curriculum and instruction. We will be discussing her article noticing and wondering a language structure to support mentoring conversations published in the 2019 issue of the mathematics teacher educator journal. We will begin by summarizing the main points of the article and discuss in more depth the lessons she shared in the article, her successes and challenges and how these lessons relate to her current work. Sara, thank you for joining us.

0:53  
Thank you for having me. So

0:54  
let's just jump in and give us a brief summary of the article including the results.

0:59  
Sure. So the article discusses the complex task of mentoring and considers how a short orientation that offers noticing and wondering language to structure mentoring conversations, how it might help support more educative conversations and field placements, essentially making them a place where pre service teachers can learn even more. The study investigates the effectiveness of this intervention by having three pairs of mentors and pre service teachers who are in their internship, complete audio recorded mentoring conversations about two different videos of someone else's teaching before the intervention. And then they take what they've learned in the intervention and they practice it back in the field for a few weeks. And then they have a post conversation about those same two videos just because I wanted the content of the conversations to stay the same. I then took that audio transcribe it and looked at the stance of each of the conversation turns in the pre and post conversations I used quoting from Vanessa for the stance to think about are these terms descriptive evaluative or interpretive to investigate if the language structure supported more descriptive interpretive stances which open up those conversations versus closing them off which educative statement or evaluative statements can do. And essentially, what I really wanted to see was just if the language supported that if that language structure that noticing and wondering language could support stances that aligned with educative mentoring and inquiring into teaching to improve teaching, the results indicated that parents have actually appreciated the language structure, they reported that it was helpful, created safe ways of talking. And they did show that they were beginning to adopt the language and their post conversations for those that did not have the language beforehand. The stance of the mentoring conversations from the pre to the post, continued to be valued at which is it's worthy of noting but sort of concerning because those evaluative moments are actually spots that kind of close off opportunities to learn from teaching. And then while the shifts in the language were minimal, a closer investigation of the 14 turns actually contain the words notice or wonder revealed some interesting patterns about the I noticed, I wonder framework for talking about it. And specifically that noticing appeared in all three stance categories. So our mentors and our pre service teachers were using it with a stance that was descriptive, evaluated and interpretive. But the wondering was the part of the language structure that was always coded, interpretive, and thus, there's some potential for this language structure to support educative mentoring practices that inquire about teaching, in that it specifically might hinge on that second half language structure, the wondering, which encourages parents to question investigate the teaching. So that's kind of what it's about

3:44  
possum, let me ask you, just because when you read the title mentoring, let's be specific of what kind of mentoring situation we're in and use terms like internship and those Could you explain just a teacher education system that you're in and where exactly these conversations are happening? Sure. So

4:05  
the study took place in the Midwest and a large traditional teacher education program as a five year program. And they refer to the student teaching component as an internship. And it was a full year long internship.

4:16  
So they do like a bachelor's degree, and then a fifth year kind of thing. When you say it's a five year program,

4:24  
I actually can't remember if I didn't know the program well enough, I guess I don't remember if that was that it was part of masters credits, or if it was how they completed the bachelor's piece. But it was how they actually ended up it was the last piece where they were in a classroom taking over various components of the classroom responsibilities, evidence load. So at one point, they were maybe teaching one of the classes all the way up to a full load and back down again.

4:48  
So this was at the end of the teacher education program, and they were in a classroom in somebody else's classroom and that somebody else was their mentor.

4:57  
Yeah, some programs called them quiet. Teachers, okay, it would be the actual classroom teacher that the university pre service teacher was going and working with.

5:08  
Okay, so we're talking like an experienced teacher and a person who wants to become a teacher has conversations between those two. Yes, that's this specific study, I

5:16  
do think that there's space to extend it out to any conversations that we're really having about teaching. But this particular piece is kind of situated in that student teaching internship space.

5:27  
Okay, so let's jump into the next question. Who do you think should be reading this article?

5:33  
I think mathematics teacher educators will appreciate the way that this interview intervention attempts to address a piece of AMT standards for preparing beginning teachers in mathematics, and will likely imagine many different ways that they can utilize noticing a wandering language in their work, whether it's with pre service or in service teachers, I believe people who are looking for ways to engage teachers in those critical conversations about mathematics teaching, might find this intervention useful as well. So thinking about mathematics coaches, university supervisors, leaders of professional learning, communities are working, working on some type of peer observation, maybe we're talking about teaching, or anybody really involved in field experiences that are trying to support the mentoring work that's happening making that bridge between the university and our partnering schools.

6:19  
So let me summarize everybody who wants to have conversations about teaching? Yeah, and from reading. Okay, that's what I thought when I was reading it. Can you talk a little bit about what the important problem is that you addressed with this article.

6:36  
So field experiences and quality mentoring are two influential components of teacher preparation development. But the support that mentors provide very significantly, we know based on how the mentors engage with prospective teachers, and can essentially make these placements more or less adjective for them. So they're either learning a lot in their placement, or sometimes they're not learning as much as we would hope that they would be. So this article provides a starting point for how we might support the mentor teachers who are supporting our students in the field by offering them a language structure as a tool for having additive conversation that encourage our teachers, or those pre service teachers to investigate and learn from their teaching. Finding ways to support and develop mentors aligns, like I said, with AMT standards that they released, and that need for having qualified mentor teachers and supervisors. The intervention also offers it takes into consideration that we have some time and resource constraints around professional development with our mentors. And this is kind of looking at something that might be something that many programs could actually utilizing us.

7:38  
So it's like a quicker thing. It doesn't take years to maybe it takes years to master but it doesn't take years to start doing to offer to them as a

7:47  
tool, right.

7:48  
Okay, so how does this article the work that you did a build on existing work and you already mentioned Vanessa's framework? So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you built on that what that is and how you built on that? And if there's other stuff you want to bring in? Sure.

8:07  
So I actually like to think about this project as being more grounded in the educative mentoring and then the teacher noticing so five minutes or describes adjective mentoring as the conversational work between mentors and pre service teachers or other teachers that describes and inquires about episodes of teaching with that shared goal of improving teaching. And these educative mentoring conversations are framed around investigating teaching and they've demonstrated evidence for improving pre service teachers learning as noted by stimulus little and weapons to educative mentoring conversations are driven by the practice though of teacher noticing and we there's kind of that extra fold and thinking about the mentor teacher needs to wear their lens as a professional noticing to be able to think about and notice the important moments that they want to leverage in the discussion with the pre service teacher that would come out in the adjective mentoring conversations. And that's how we differentiate those conversations for our teachers. So with that piece of teacher noticing, I borrowed from vanasse, her analytic stances of descriptive evaluative interpretive that she used to look at how teachers discussed important moments in teaching when they were in the video clubs. And because it was a conversation about teaching, I felt like it was really applicable to thinking about the mentoring conversations and how they were talking about teaching in a video as well just the two of them together. And then I intentionally selected Smith's noticing a wandering model because it it blends. She doesn't say this, but to me, it sort of blends the teacher noticing with the investigation of teaching that educative mentoring asked for by aiming those conversations on the observable practices. I noticed the specific thing and the observation and also inviting teachers to actively participate with their mentors in the analysis and reflection of the teaching to support that improvement of practice that we talked about in education, mentoring or the I wonder kind of sitting in a space there to think about it.

10:02  
So you talked about three different kinds, evaluative, interpretive and descriptive descriptive. I'm wondering if you could give us a quick example of each of them.

10:15  
So descriptive would be something that's kind of just stating exactly what you saw in the observations. So I saw Jimmy was having a hard time getting started, or I saw Jimmy didn't get anything as paper. It's, it's exactly what we're seeing. There's no added input, a value to the something that makes the conversation turn makes a judgment that approves disproves or critiques the video moment. Sometimes this was them saying while they did something a lot, or I wouldn't have done it that way. Right. So it adds that evaluative judgment into the conversation. And then interpreted are these statements were like, they're trying to make sense of what they're seeing or trying to understand or explain a particular observation. So I noticed the teacher said that it was going to be 10 seconds, but then she took a lot longer to do something. I wonder if that was because she lost track of the time or I wonder if that was because she was walking around and notice formatively that it wasn't time to move forward yet. Right, like so there, there were sensemaking in there.

11:18  
Okay. And that actually leads us really nicely into the next question, where I'm going to ask you to describe a little bit what is this innovation? So you're naming it noticing and wondering language structure to support mentoring? What exactly is this?

11:34  
So that is, so this has been interesting, Smith offers a noticing a wondering length, she calls it a model. And that's just this sentence frame sort of that says, I noticed blank, I wonder blank, you paired them together really nicely to make sentences. The intervention that I propose is actually or that is in the article and described was taking that structure and saying how do we put it into some type of a professional development, that teachers could walk away and feel like they could use the structure and that it would help them in their mentoring conversations. So the intervention described in the article as a two hour discussion based orientation session for mentors and pre service teachers to attend to gather, I felt like that was really important because I wanted to begin fostering those conversations right from the get go and give them that common language to talk with. in that session we offered or I offered noticing a wandering language as a structure for the mentoring conversations, developing it, it was driven with three goals in mind. For me, I wanted to offer the language structure to them for mentoring conversations, I wanted to share or make sure that they understood the affordances that might motivate them to go back to the classroom and try the language out. And then the last thing I really wanted to do was make sure that we rehearsed it and gave them time to ask questions so that they felt like they could go back and implement it right away. So those three goals in mind the actual intervention, and it's, it's detailed in the article, please read it has three different activities, three components. So the first one was to decompose the practice by offering examples and noticing a wandering language. So this was where I introduced to the the mentors and pre service teachers I introduced Smith's noticing a wandering model, I actually shared the snippet of her story that she uses, we discussed the affordances specifically that it grounds the conversation and observable moments and that the wondering, helps us inquire investigate the moment to improve the teaching. The second part then, so once they understood that, and I was kind of paused and would say, Okay, now turn and talk for a minute, is this something that you can imagine yourself using? Is this something that you might like to try when you go back into the classroom? and nine times out of 10? hypothetically speaking, they say, yeah, I'm open to trying this. And so then we move on, and we say, Okay, so let's practice. So the first part is rehearsing unison using the noticing language together after they read a teaching scenario. So the reading piece is, was done intentionally, I wanted to reduce that cognitive demand on the teacher noticing part. So by giving them a paragraph, I was telling them what they noticed. And then their job was really to write that noticing a wandering statement. And so I would tell the mentors, okay, so I want you to pretend for a minute, you're going to practice writing, like you're giving feedback to your pre service teacher, pre service teachers, I want you to write like you're trying to enquire about something that your mentor teacher just did. So, you know, you just saw something and you're like, why did they do that? Right? But you don't want to come across as like, why would you do that? Right, like so instead, like, let's write a noticing and wondering statement to get at the heart of it. And so a way we would go, they would share out we talked about where the conversations could go. And then the third activity was where we actually would use a video teaching scenario to rehearse these statements. I made the decision to use a video my own practice was so that one they could write about videoing videos can sometimes be difficult to get a hold of. But also because I wanted to be able to respond, I want it to be able to to have them start the conversation without noticing a wandering statement. And for me to be able to respond and elaborate on whatever it was that they were wondering about, and oftentimes, whatever it was that they would offer me and I would do some explaining back, because that's what's nice about the the structure is that it actually positions me as knowing something and doing something intentionally not like I don't know. And I think that's important, too, for our pre service teachers to be treated like professionals, because they're beginning professionals. But then for them to kind of continue to ask me So because of that, you know, but in the conversation, we'll kind of go from there. And that's the type of investigative like explaining and discussing and brainstorming of ideas that we want to be happening and are mentoring conversations. So those are the three components that make up the intervention.

15:56  
So I have to say, when you read an article like this, it sounds like, Oh, that's a small little thing, right? I noticed, I wonder. But it's actually a very complex thing, because you're required not only to notice, but to interpret like you notice. So there's like multiple layers of difficulty in that one sentence structure.

16:19  
There is.

16:20  
So you talked a tiny bit at the beginning about your results. But I'd like you to kind of go into what were your research questions with how you studied and documented the effectiveness of this innovation? Sure. So

16:34  
there were two research questions. The first one was after a mentoring orientation, which was the intervention, to what extent do mentors and pre service teachers adopt noticing a wondering language and mentoring conversations? So just looking at the frequency of the words notice and wonder, and a few people have actually asked like, Well, did you think about, you know, counting words, like I see, for I noticed, and I didn't, that would be interesting to continue working on. But for this, I really just wanted to see what specific components of the PD they picked up and ran with? And then the second question was, in what ways does the noticing and wondering language influence the stance of the mentoring conversations, and that's where each of the turns were coded, use as either descriptive, interpretive or evaluative, and then looking at percentages of the conversation. So in the pre conversation, what percentage was evaluated? What percentage was descriptive? What percentage was interpretive? And then in the post conversation, what was the percentages? And how did they stay the same or change?

17:38  
And so how did they stay the same or change?

17:40  
It was kind of disappointing. So I mentioned this little bit, but the conversations in the beginning were pretty valued to like, we have a lot of evaluative terms. And while there were some shifts, they were really minor, there's still a lot of evaluative terms happening. And that's disappointing. Not that we have bad mentors, but just because it has opportunities that we're closing opportunities to talk about teaching when we do that. So that's a space that I think we need to keep talking about as math teacher educators and keep thinking about how do we, how do we support our mentors? And how do we support our pre service teachers.

18:13  
The good news was,

18:14  
was that they did start picking up the noticing and wondering language structure, they reported in exit interviews that it was helpful. One of the pre service teachers even said that they had used it when they needed to have what they felt like was a difficult conversation with their mentor. And that the language I noticed, and I wondered, almost kind of acted as a cue to the mentor of like ham trying to tell you something really important. And so I'm trying to think about it carefully. They felt like it was good. I also looked at patterns. And I think that that was the like we say notice and wonder is kind of simplistic, but it was really interesting when I looked at the patterns of the coding of the stances, noticing was used in all three. And so the noticing part, saying I saw something in this moment of teaching can be descriptive, or evaluative or interpretive. It's eight lands and all three of them. And it's, it's helpful, because we need to ground the conversation there. But if we really want to be interpretive, it's the it hinges on that second piece of the wondering. And that's the tough part. And so there's a lot in the discussion where I kind of hypothesize, like, why do we think that maybe our mentor teachers are priests? Or like, why did they pick up the noticing more easily? Perhaps they already had components in their mentoring conversations where they spoke this way, or they were used to identifying things and teaching. But the wondering seems to be a bit more difficult, whether it's that they didn't have that type of practice already. Or, you know, as you were saying it, it makes you have to sort of think carefully about what do I want to push on or what framework do I want to use to ask a question or to wonder about something and what's worthy of wondering

19:57  
Yeah, there's different noticing framework that has the notion of noticing, interpreting and responding. And I think that they were like noticing is step one, right? I mean, you can't do anything without noticing. But then interpreting is like a step two, right? Like, trying to figure out like you said, I wonder about data. And then there's even the next step, like, what would you do? Right, which you didn't even touch on yet. So I think that's a really powerful result of your paper, is that if I'm imagining that, if we use the sentence structure, I noticed that, ah, I wonder, and we really help people reflect on finishing both parts, then we might get more of those conversations that are interpretive, rather than evaluative, or descriptive.

20:51  
That would definitely be my hope. In fact, after doing an after looking at the data, I've made some changes to the intervention. And I talked about those two recommendations at the end of the paper and how, one I think that we need to build an awareness of the noticing and the wondering and how important the wondering pieces and how that's where the interpretive thinking, and the piece that really supports those educative mentoring conversations is with mentors, and with pre service teachers, too. But then there's the other piece where, and I, I think part of it was that the group that I had that volunteered, there wasn't very many, our mentor teachers are busy. And so I took who I could get and said, let's try it. Some more social studies, teachers, and some more math teachers. And so I needed some cases that they all could relate to. And it tended to be around classroom management or classroom routines. But, you know, reflecting on that experience, now, if we really want to improve mathematics, instruction, and teaching for students, then we really need to pick scenarios and pick situations that they can notice that and so I also have thought about the wondering is really making connections to either practice that you like your own practice and asking questions, or why do you do something differently, and wondering about like, how they made that decision, or it could be based around the frameworks like teaching framework, so whether it's the Standards for Mathematical Practice, or if it's around the effective mathematics, teaching practices, we can use those to give us something to wonder about in a lot of cases, and that also might help mentors, not feel like wondering could be viewed as evaluative, sometimes you know, that idea of asking a question about someone's teaching, some are afraid to do because they don't want to come across as judgment judgmental. And so if we give them a framework that where we say we're working on that might open the door to actually have more wondering,

22:47  
so two questions to kind of round out this interview. One is, I was just wondering if you had followed up with those teachers in your study again later, and whether they were still using some of that's language I didn't,

23:05  
I moved.

23:06  
I figured you didn't. But I was just curious.

23:08  
Yeah, I have not stayed in contact. I've presented nctm and State Conference, and I've had coaches and teachers come up to me later and say, I'm taking this back. And they've emailed and said, I want it, I want you to know that I'm using it awesome. I've shared it with colleagues too. And at the time, when I was teaching, I shared it with other others who are mentoring pre service teachers. And they would come back and say, that helped me that made that conversation easier to have. So

23:33  
this runs nice into the second question I had, what piece of advice do you have for people who want to use this? And what might you want to hear back other than they used it? Like? Are you interested in what they found? Like, what might you be interested in hearing back?

23:48  
So my piece of advice would be even as I was working at adopting it, and I'm still working on it, I often find that it's a lot easier to write out. I know this thing I'm wondering question or statement first. And I like to give warm, cool and challenging feedback to my pre service teachers. So I kind of situate all of them ahead of time and then walk into the conversation because it also lets me double check and make sure that my wandering doesn't feel like a gotcha. So like, if an administrator were to use this language, I think that would be interesting. But I also think that there's a space where like, how do we make sure that it's a true wondering and not not a wandering statement? That kind of feels like a, you know, a gotcha. I don't know how else to say it. Like, you know, it's still judging in terms of what I would love to hear from other people like if they're using it. I notice now whenever I go to conferences, our mathematics teacher educate, we notice and wonder a lot. Like if you step back and just start to listen, like this is language that I feel like when I go to conferences I hear all the time, which is really positive and encouraging to we just need to find ways to share it and I think that there's a there'll probably be more patterns that we start to notice as we use it more and really investigate the ways in which it's being used. That could also be really helpful, because I think it'll just inform the innovation, like how we share with mentors that much more.

25:16  
Well. Thank you so much. For further information on this topic, you can find the article on the mathematics teacher educator website. This has been your host, Eva anhyzer. Thanks for listening and goodbye.