Chao, T., Murray, E., & Star, J. R. (2016).

Helping mathematics teachers develop noticing skills:

Utilizing smartphone technology for one-on-one teacher/student interviews.Contemporary Issues
in Technology and Teacher Education, 16(1), 22-37.

Helping Mathematics Teachers Develop Noticing

Skills: Utilizing Smartphone Technology for One-
on-One Teacher/Student Interviews

Theodore Chao
The Ohio State University

Eileen Murray
Montclair State University

Jon R. Star
Harvard University

Abstract

Teaching mathematics for understanding requires listening to each student’s

mathematical thinking, best elicited in a one-on-one interview. Interviews are
difficult to enact in a teacher’s busy schedule, however. In this study, the authors
utilize smartphone technology to help mathematics teachers interview a student
in a virtual one-on-one setting. Free from physical constraints and preconceived
biases, teachers can concentrate on building questioning, listening, and
responding skills when noticing student mathematical thinking. Teachers
engaged in four communication types when working with students through this
technology: clarification, verification, and either extension or redirection.

Modern day mathematics teaching focuses heavily on inquiry. This sort of mathematics
teaching, often labeled as reform-oriented or inquiry-oriented mathematics teaching,
emphasizes conceptual understanding and procedural fluency as opposed to speed and
recall (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2000). Teachers’ instruction,
therefore, revolves around understanding how students think, specifically the strategies
that students create when trying to solve problems for the first time.

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For instance, suppose a teacher is interested in how students solve a proportional

reasoning problem, such as follows: “Teddy read 30 pages of a book in 45 minutes. How
many pages should he be able to read in 120 minutes?” A general teaching flow for this
type of problem might involve a proportion with an unknown variable, 30/45 = x/120,
and then teaching cross-multiplication to form the equation 45x = (30)(120).

This approach, while efficient, limits students’ understanding of why the teacher
converted the proportion to an equation or how the procedure connects to the number of
pages Teddy has read. Inquiry-oriented teaching, on the other hand, requires students to
explore this problem on their own, to attempt to understand what is being asked, and to
formulate a strategy. Then, the teacher can connect each student’s strategies to other
strategies in the class and, perhaps, to a general strategy.

Understanding exactly how a student solved a problem, unraveling the layers of steps and
missteps a student took, however, requires a patience and attention aimed at individual
students. This understanding does not happen when a student writes and explains a quick
explanation on the board. Nor does it happen when a teacher circulates around the room,
hovering over students as they work. Rather, the most effective way to understand and
listen to the way a student thinks mathematically is through a one-on-one investigative
interview between teacher and student, a technique honed by Piaget and referred to as
aclinical interview (Ginsburg, 1997) or diagnostic interview (Huff & Goodman, 2007).

Teachers rarely engage in these one-on-one interviews for a number of reasons (Zazkis &
Hazzan, 1998). First, teachers seldom have time in a busy school day to sit with a student
for a one-on-one interview (Hunting, 1997). Second, learning how to question, listen, and
respond to a student are highly refined teaching skills that do not simply manifest
without organized support (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010). Yet, few teachers have access
to support that helps them focus on noticing mathematical thinking. Third, whenever
teachers work with students, certain student attributes affect their disposition toward
that student (Dunn, 2004). That is, teachers cannot help but notice certain student
characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, familiarity with mathematical vocabulary, or
even the clothes a student is wearing. These factors consciously and subconsciously affect
how a teacher hears what a student is saying, inevitably creating prejudices that reify a
teacher’s perception of a student and obstruct an opportunity to focus on active listening
of a student’s mathematical thinking. Additionally, providing spaces for teachers to
practice listening to children’s mathematical thinking, particularly children they might
not know or work with regularly, focuses teachers’ attention completely on the child’s
thinking rather than subconsciously evaluating a student’s physical attributes.

We attempt to address these problems by introducing an idea formulated in a current

technology tool that brings the teacher-to-student interview into the modern era and
helps to develop a teacher’s mathematical noticing skills. We have built technology that
allows teachers and students to interact without having to be physically next to each
other, helping to mitigate pre-conceived biases so teachers can focus on building their
skill in noticing student thinking.

In our study, we asked the research question: When using smartphone technology for a
one-on-one teacher/student mathematics interviews, what is revealed about how
mathematics teachers notice through the way they question, listen to, and respond to
student mathematical thinking?

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Literature Review

Recent research on teaching mathematics (Jacobs et al., 2010; Smith & Stein, 2011) as
well as the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics Teaching Practices (National
Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School
Officers, 2010) have outlined the importance of a particular set of teacher skills: the
ability to question, listen to, and respond to a students’ mathematical thinking. We refer
to the termnoticing, particularly, mathematics teacher noticing, to encompass these
constructs. While the act of noticing often refers to the ways a teacher attends to,
interprets, and responds to students’ thinking within a classroom environment (Jacobs et
al., 2010), we apply the construct of noticing to a one-on-one interview environment.

Questioning

For teachers, learning how to question is the first step in attempting to understand a
student’s mathematical thinking. Questioning not only evaluates a student’s
mathematical knowledge, but also helps teachers understand how a student thinks
(Aizikovitsh-Udi & Star, 2011). Furthermore, good teacher questions help students in
their own thinking by guiding their attention, loosening up their thinking, or forcing them
to articulate their ideas (Smith & Stein, 2011).

Good questioning involves focusing on concepts rather than calculations and allows for
wait time after a student’s response (Herbel-Eisenmann & Cirillo, 2009). Therefore, in
order for a platform to allow for effective mathematics teacher questioning, it must (a)
allow for multiple types of questions that focus on student thinking and concepts and (b)
integrate wait time that occurs after a student’s response.

Listening

Teaching mathematics for understanding requires responsive listening–not only to what

a student says or shows, but also to what a student is thinking. Listening is the heart of
effective mathematics teaching practice–the bridge between a teacher’s questioning and
subsequent response (Duckworth, 2001; Empson & Jacobs, 2008). Sherin and van Es’s
(2009) work on teacher video clubs found that when teachers stepped outside the
classroom and learned to interpret events as opposed to judging whether they were good
or bad, they were able to stop critiquing the teaching and focus on understanding what
students knew. These teachers honed their listening skills through continually rewatching
and discussing video of their own student/teacher interactions.

Furthermore, Empson and Jacobs (2008) found that learning to listen required repeated
viewings of supported student/teacher one-on-one interactions. Therefore, any platform
that allows for teacher listening/noticing must (a) move outside the whole-group
classroom environment, (b) help teachers learn to interpret their own interactions with
students, as opposed to evaluate them, and (c) allow teachers multiple viewings of their
interactions with students.

Responding

Of the three noticing skills, learning to respond to children’s thinking is the hardest skill
for teachers to develop, yet the most effective in extending student learning (Jacobs &
Ambrose, 2008). While teachers develop questioning and listening skills over time, the
ability to respond does not automatically develop with experience. Smith and Stein (2011)
found that teachers needed extensive sustained practice in learning how to respond to

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student thinking in order to develop a repertoire of appropriate responses. Therefore, any

platform that helps teachers respond to student mathematical thinking must provide
ample opportunity and support for teachers to practice how to respond.

Technology Framework

Our work extends prior scholarship on mathematics teacher noticing, particular in its
subconstructs of how teachers question, listen, and respond to students within a one-on-
one interview setting. Little work exists exploring the nuances of the one-on-one
mathematics interview, which may be because previous technologies did not allow for
precision in capturing data within the interview itself (Hunting, 1997).

The technological features that seem necessary in order to explore mathematics teacher
noticing within a problem solving interview include (a) the capture of every utterance or
artifact, (b) ability to re-watch anything previously written or recorded, (c) virtual
interactions so both parties do not have to be physically present, and (d) immediate
access of a fellow math educator for teacher support.

By using existing technology found in smartphones, we have developed a system that

captures every artifact and utterance made between teacher and student. These small
words, phrases, and diagrams are crucial in understanding how teachers and students
talk to each other. Previously, capturing every audio utterance or facial expression
required massive amounts of video and audio data collection and storage. Through
utilizing smart phones as our communication conduit, all utterances are documented as
part of the back-and-forth nature of mobile chats, revealing a digital transcript of text
messages, images, and video that teachers and students use to discuss and share their
mathematical thinking.

Second, smartphone textual, photo, and video-based communications create a visual

record that both teacher and student can recall and refer to in the midst of their
interview. This ability to watch a student’s explanation repeatedly or to scroll back in time
adds precision to the interview.

Third, our technology situates the interview virtually, so the teacher and student never
see each other. By physically separating teacher and student, we attempt to mitigate
preconceived notions that both teacher and student might make about each other in a
teacher training exercise to develop their noticing skills.

Finally, a fellow mathematics educator is available for immediate access to the teacher for
support, either physically or through the technology itself. The teacher can ask for
guidance as to how to question, listen to, or respond to student thinking, or to articulate
next steps.

We find the use of smartphone-based technology beneficial when working with current
pre- and in-service mathematics teachers for three reasons.

• Using a smartphone to focus on mathematical student thinking is within the

normal, everyday use of smartphones for today’s teachers.
• Our technology works on currently available and accessible technology; teachers
do not have to acquire new equipment, hardware, or software.
• The technology is simple: a conduit of video, images, and text untethered to a
particular phone or operating system.

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Research Methods

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate how teachers notice students’
mathematical thinking within a one-on-one interview when given the opportunity to use
technology. We collected qualitative data to gain a better understand of how teachers
question, listen to, and respond to student thinking, as well as their feedback to the entire
virtual interaction.

Participants

Our study involved three mathematics teachers in the northeastern region of the United
States engaged in a one-on-one interview with a student using our technology. Teachers
were recruited through existing networks of mathematics teachers that the authors were
members of, being mathematics teacher educators and professional developers. Teachers
were selected based on interest in piloting technology that helps teachers learn to listen to
student mathematical thinking.Mildred had taught seventh and eighth-grade for less than
5 years at a public science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focused
magnet middle school. Justin had taught ninth-grade algebra and 12th-grade calculus
and precalculus at a public high school for less than 5 years. Skyler had taught 2nd and
1st-grade in a private elementary school for 5 years.

Data Collection

Teachers each used their smartphones to interact with what they believed to be a student
who shared a video of how he solved a prechosen mathematical problem. These initial
student videos were under 2 minutes each and consisted of point-of-view shots from a
student’s perspective of how he attempted to solve the mathematical task.

The student for this study was the first author pretending to be a student. This deception
was necessary in order to create an idealized case to explore how teachers interacted with
this technology. To do this, we met as a research team to detail specifically how the
student should respond to provide systematic strategy, thinking, and responses. By
controlling exactly what the student did and said, we were able to focus on the teacher
and examine what might be possible with this technology. In the videos, one of the
authors had his 5-year old daughter play the part of the elementary student. For ease of
reading, we refer to the researcher deceptively interacting with the teacher as “the
student.”

Before the student interview began, the teachers were given the opportunity to review and
attempt to solve the task and ask questions about the process. Then, each teacher sat with
a member of the research team for a 30-60 minute student interview session, interacting
with the student through a smartphone. During the student interview session, we
videotaped the teachers in order to capture their reactions and responses to the student.
We refer to these data as the “teacher video,” whereas all other references to video refer to
those sent between the teacher and student about the mathematics problem.

The student interview session began when the student sent the teacher a video of how he
or she solved or attempted to solve a mathematical task. The videos involved the student
narrating his or her strategy for the problem, pointing to written work on paper. Each
video was shot from the student’s perspective, with the student’s finger pointing out
specific parts of his or her strategy during the course of the explanation.

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For Mildred and Justin, who work with secondary students, the student worked with a
ratio and proportional reasoning problem: “Teddy read 30 pages of a book in 45 minutes.
How many pages should he be able to read in 120 minutes?” (See Video 1.)

Video 1. A “student” sent to secondary teachers Mildred and Justin to solve the task,
“Teddy read 30 pages of a book in 45 minutes. How many pages should he be able to read
in 120 minutes?” The student has already written out his strategy and uses his finger and
voice to explain his thinking, mimicking a high school student’s confusing explanation.
This video can also be viewed at https://vid.me/GQ3R.

For Skyler, who works with young elementary students, the student worked with the
equal sharing problem: “Three children share 10 mini-burritos so that each child gets the
same amount. How much burrito does each child get?” Skylar was told that her student
was sitting with an adult researcher, who helped her make the videos and type the text
messages back to Skylar. (See Video 2.)

We chose the tasks because the content would be familiar to teachers and the student
reasoning would be potentially complex and in need of unpacking, based upon the
literature of how students approach these problems (Ben-Chaim, Fey, Fitzgerald,
Benedetto, & Miller, 1998; Empson, 1999; Empson & Levi, 2011; Tourniaire & Pulos,
1985). These tasks were also chosen because they had an initially high level of cognitive
demand (Smith & Stein, 2011), were applicable to student strategy comparison (Rittle-
Johnson & Star, 2007), and contained the possibility for teachers to notice mathematical
thinking (Jacobs et al., 2010).

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Video 2. Initial video that a “student” sent to elementary teacher Skyler to solve the task,
“Three children share 10 mini-burritos so that each child gets the same amount. How
much burrito does each child get?” The student has drawn three children, each with a
number of small ellipses (burritos) in each child’s belly. The student has written out,
“Every child gets 3. Cut last burrito in 3. Understand?” The student here is played by one
author’s 5-year old daughter. This video can also be viewed at https://vid.me/hcp0.

Throughout the interview, we asked the teachers to think aloud in their interaction with
the student about what they noticed and what question they might ask the student. The
teachers were then told that before they gave the student feedback, they had the
opportunity to ask the student some clarifying questions. The purpose for this strategy
was to help the teachers take time to reflect on the student’s mathematical thinking and
to make sure they could engage the student in a meaningful discussion about his
thinking.

This phase of the session involved the teacher and student text messaging back and forth
to clarify specifics about the student’s strategy. If the teacher did not want to ask
questions, the researcher asked the teacher to explain what the teacher understood about
the student’s strategy.

Next, when the teachers felt they understood the student’s strategy, the research team
member asked them what their plan was for the feedback and to articulate a goal or goals
for the communication. The researcher asked questions such as, “In an idealized
environment free from the extra pressures and noise of the classroom, what would you
want the student to explain? What would you want the student to know or be able to do?”

For example, for the proportional reasoning problem, Mildred wanted the student to find
the solution using cross multiplication. The researcher informed Mildred that the
discussion would stop when she felt the student was where she wanted with using cross
multiplication as a strategy. Teachers then asked follow-up questions, which could
involve unpacking the student’s strategy, asking students to make additional videos or
solving the tasks using a different strategy.

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We aligned our guidance with our noticing framework: teachers asked questions to attend
to and interpret a student’s thinking, then articulated their feedback plan on how they
would respond to the student. We also provided time for each teacher to reflect on the
interaction in order to make sense of the mathematical thinking exhibited. This step
involved the teacher and student sending texts, videos, and images back and forth to
clarify specifics about the student’s strategy, the teacher asking students to solve the same
tasks using a different strategy, and the teacher asking the student to make additional
videos (see Figure 1).

After the interaction, we asked the teachers postinterview questions about the interaction,
such as "How did you feel about this medium in terms of engaging with the student?”
or “In what ways did the video help you understand that is different than what you might
notice in the classroom?” Mildred said she would be scared to use this medium with her
students, revealing that she is extremely cautious in how she communicates with students
outside of the classroom. Justin liked the interactions, finding that it forced him to think
more about what his student said. Skylar liked focusing her attention on only one
student’s thinking, noting that she could understand the student well because her voice
was clear.

Figure 1. A teacher and student engaged in smartphone-based problem solving

interview, in which the teacher watches a video of the student’s strategy and then
questions the student about it. Notice that the teacher is asking questions to clarify and
verify his interpretation of the student’s strategy.

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Analysis

We used thematic analysis to analyze the data collected during the interviews. Thematic
analysis is a “common general approach to analyzing qualitative data that does not rely
on the specialized procedures of other means of analysis” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 291). By
using this approach and grounding our thinking in teachers’ professional noticing
literature, we were able to identify and code the different communication types used by
the participants.

Our data consisted of the teacher video; the text, photo, and video messages sent back
and forth between the teacher and student; and any written artifacts from the interaction.
We started with a theoretical framework that predicted the teachers would engage in
either clarification or verification questions (defined in Table 1). We used this skeletal
framework to analyze the interaction of each teacher.

To analyze the data, two members of the research team watched each teacher video
together. In these meetings, we frequently stopped the videos, wrote analytical memos,
and engaged in discussions about what we noticed. For critical moments during the
interview, we generated transcripts detailing the rhythm of each interaction as well as
what we saw in terms of what the teachers noticed about student mathematical thinking.
We paid attention to each teacher’s facial expressions, vocal tone, and the speed with
which they responded to students.

Essentially, we micro-analyzed the specific visual and textual artifacts and utterances
shared between teacher and students through our technology, as well as what the teacher
was doing during these moments of sharing (as in Corbin & Strauss, 2008). When we
were finished with this analysis, we went back to all the analytical memos with the
purpose of understanding if and how our ideas regarding teacher-student interaction
were related to teacher noticing. After discussion between research team members, we
decided that we should add two additional categories to our framework: extension and
redirection (defined in Table 1).

As a result of this analysis, we settled on four communication types related to

mathematics teacher noticing. We then went back into each teacher’s interaction to create
a map of how the teachers navigated between these four communication types. These
communication types might not be generalizable to all teachers because it is based only
on our analysis of three teachers (Erlandson, Harris, Skipper, & Allen, 1993). Through the
use of thick description and micro-analysis of the interactions, however, we can
confidently create a theoretical framework for further inquiry into this new space of using
technology for one-on-one teacher-student mathematics interviews.

Results

We started this work to explore how teachers could use technology within a one-on-one
interview and what this technology could unveil so we could better understand the way
teachers and students communicate about mathematical thinking. The three teachers
each showed different ways of engaging in mathematical noticing when using this
interview technology. The middle school teacher, Mildred, kept trying to push the student
toward a traditional, algebraic algorithm applicable to all cases. The high school teacher,
Justin, expressed interest in using this technology in an ideal classroom so he could
spend more time probing and extending individual student problem solving. The
elementary teacher, Skyler, straddled the traditional versus inquiry-oriented fence by

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trying to listen to the student’s unique strategy but was hesitant to accept it because it was
neither efficient nor applicable to all cases.

We noticed that teachers combined listening with questioning and responding, meaning
that the way they questioned or responded was based on the way they listened. Therefore,
in connecting to the literature around mathematics teacher noticing, we categorized two
communication types of teacher questioning, clarification and verification, and two
communication types of teacher listening, extension and redirection. (See Table 1 for
definitions and examples of each type of communication.)

Type of
Communication Definition Example
Clarification When the teacher tries to Okay, can you clarify how you
understand exactly what a student decided to subtract 10 pages and
did and why, in order to fill in 15 minutes? – Mildred Tell me
missing details or clarify how you decided that each friend
ambiguous video, audio, or text started with 3 burritos. – Skylar
from a student.
Verification When the teacher asks So you can manipulate the rate by
confirmation questions about the any amount, and you didn’t like
student’s strategy, restates a 22.5 because it didn’t divide
student’s thinking and asks for evenly into 120. Is that still the
confirmation. number of pages he can read in 15
minutes? – Justin Do you and
your friends each have an equal
share? How do you know? –
Skylar
Extension When the teacher broadens the So what if I read at the same rate
original problem in order to build as Teddy and read for 100
upon the student’s strategy, minutes? How many pages? And
requiring the ability to make what if I read for 84 minutes? –
inferences about what a student Justin Let’s refocus: given the
understands and then to formulate reading rate of 30p/45m what is
questions that probe into this the smallest rate I can pull from
thinking. that? Is it 10p/15m? – Justin
Redirection When the teacher redirects a Ok, do you think you could set
student towards a teacher- this problem up a different way?
presented strategy when the How can you solve it
teacher feels she or he has heard algebraically? – Mildred Can you
enough of what a student is write as a fraction how much each
thinking or thinks the student is girl got to eat? – Skylar
headed down an incorrect path
and decides to intervene by telling
the student to use a particular
strategy.

When teachers questioned the student through this interface, they were either clarifying
or verifying. Clarification involved trying to understand exactly what a student did and
why in order to fill in missing details or clarify ambiguous video, audio, or text from a
student. Verification involved the teacher asking confirmation questions about the
student’s strategy. Verification is similar to the revoice classroom talk move, in which a

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teacher restates a student’s contribution for the rest of the classroom to hear and then
asks the student to verify if this is what he or she meant (Chapin, O’Connor, & Anderson,
2003). Verification also requires teachers to pay attention to the detail in student
thinking.

For example, Justin used verification questions to confirm his student’s strategy, texting,
“So you can manipulate the rate by any amount, and you didn’t like 22.5 because it didn’t
divide evenly into 120. Is that still the number of pages he can read in 15 minutes?” Justin
asked this verification not only to confirm his own understanding, but also to help his
student verify this thinking to himself. Therefore, verification served dual purposes:
helping the teacher understanding a student strategy as well as helping a student
understand his or her own strategy.

Justin’s question eventually led to a text sequence in which the student came to a more
general strategy, which was the teacher’s goal throughout this interaction. The teachers
found this technology allowed them to focus on clarification and verification, since they
could watch the videos multiple times and review every piece of communication in order
to hone in on opaque explanations, asking students to make additional videos or
diagrams that better explained their thinking. Verification questions also showed that
teachers were actively listening and attending to students’ strategies.

After questioning, teachers responded to students using either extension or redirection.

Extension broadened the original problem in order to build upon the student’s strategy.
For example, Justin tried to extend the problem using numbers in which the student’s
original strategy would break. He texted, “So what if I read at the same rate as Teddy and
read for 100 minutes? How many pages? And what if I read for 84 minutes?”

This type of communication required the ability to make inferences about what a student
understood and then formulate questions that probed into this thinking. Extension
communication moved beyond the initial problem, pushing the student to look at new
situations in order to generalize or alter the original strategy or see new aspects of this
strategy. Justin told us that this technology allowed him to push his student further than
if he was in the classroom, because he was able to review the student video and
continually ask questions to the student without feeling like he was interrupting.

Justin also felt able to present extension problems that naturally flowed within the course
of the interaction. Of the three teachers, only Justin engaged in this type of
communication, confirming how difficult and rare this type of noticing is among teachers
(Empson & Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs et al., 2010; Sherin & van Es, 2009). Furthermore,
Justin kept looking to us for guidance in asking these sorts of questions to his student.
Even with technology that facilitates this communication, he said that he needed another
educator present to talk with to articulate these extension questions.

Teachers also responded with redirection, cutting off a student’s explanation in order to
redirect a student toward a teacher-presented strategy. We had not anticipated this type
of question, which was used by Mildred and Skylar. For example, Mildred texted, “Ok, do
you think you could set this problem up a different way? How can you solve it
algebraically?” Additionally, Skylar redirected her student to use fractional language and
notation rather than continue with an equal partitioning strategy, texting “Can you write
as a fraction how much each girl got to eat?” Redirection occurs when teachers feel they
have heard enough of what a student is thinking or think the student is headed down an
incorrect path and decide to intervene by telling the student to use a particular strategy.

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Extension and redirection are mutually exclusive. A teacher can either extend a student’s
mathematical thinking or redirect a student toward a particular strategy. What influences
a teachers’ choices to extend or redirect stemmed from whether they were, in fact, actively
listening, which could be assessed in their perception of the utility of this activity.

For example, Justin viewed the interview as an opportunity to explore and probe a
student’s thinking and to listen. He thought the implementation of the interview was
powerful because it opened up an opportunity to engage with the student, to really look at
every artifact of student thinking and discuss mathematics with the student. As a result,
he engaged in extension communication to help the student augment the original strategy
into a more general one.

Mildred, on the other hand, saw the interview as an intervention or tutoring tool to help
struggling students catch up to the rest of the class. Similarly, Skylar saw the interview as
an assessment tool, comparing it to miscue analysis that occurs in reading instruction.
(Miscue Analysis is a diagnostic tool used to assess a students’ reading process. Miscues
are not mistakes, but opportunities to gain insight into student’s linguistic strengths and
meaning making, Goodman, 1969). As a result, both Mildred and Skyler used the
interview to redirect students towards strategies unrelated to the students’ original
strategy.

Another interesting result involved the embedded wait time. The process of students and
teachers sending each other videos and text messages is much slower than a typical face-
to-face interview. Much of the interview was spent waiting for the other person to
respond. Justin found this to be extremely helpful in the interaction, as it allowed both
student and teacher to take the time to articulate their thinking before writing it down or
making a video. While this process is slower than a standard face-to-face interview, it
directly embedded the good questioning technique of wait time after a student responds
that Herbel-Eisenmann and Cirillo (2009) pointed out as necessary.

We answered our original research question by finding that in a technology-enabled one-

on-one interview mathematics teachers interacting with students might use two types of
questioning strategies (clarification and verification), and two types of responding
strategies (extension and redirection). The technology zoomed into the specific utterances
and in-the-moment thinking surrounding the ways teachers interpret what a student is
saying. This study adds to the growing body of literature examining exactly how
mathematics teachers can support student mathematical thinking through the way they
speak, respond to, and listen to students. Our technology is not used as a means to
promote this type of discourse, but rather as an investigational tool to isolate and analyze
an interaction that often happens too quickly to study and unpack in a traditional
classroom setting.

Conclusion

The way we used technology in this study offers an alternate glimpse into the
teacher/student interaction compared to a standard face-to-face interview. By allowing
teachers and students to interact without having to be physically next to each other, we
hoped to mitigate preconceived biases. Teachers initially had only the student video to
examine and no other data about the student they worked with (e.g., noticing student’s
skin color, method of dress, gender, etc.). Teachers, therefore, had to focus only on the
students’ thinking, which is a different lens than they would use in a traditional classroom
setting in which a teacher notices what a student looks like before getting to know their
thinking (Dunn, 2005; White, Murray, & Brunaud-Vega, 2012). None of our teachers
mentioned or attended to the students’ gender, race, ethnicity, or background in their

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responses. Even when specifically asked about what they might know about the student in
the postinterview, each teacher mentioned being frustrated because all they could see was
the student’s hand or hear the student’s voice, unable to make many conclusions from
this information. We are not claiming this technology mitigates teacher bias, but each
teacher felt frustrated by the lack of physical attributes they could use to know the
student, forced to focus only on the text, images, and video that the student shared to
draw a conclusion about the student. Even being able to see the student’s skin color
through the student’s hand on the video or being able to hear the student’s voice did little
to ease the frustration the three teachers felt.

The biggest constraint we found in our study was whether or not teachers would actually
use this type of technology with their students. These interviews require much more time
than a traditional face-to-face interview, so expecting teachers to engage in these
extensive activities with each of their students might be unreasonable. Rather, perhaps
the best place for this sort of technology is with teacher educators or professional
developers working with preservice and in-service teachers, perhaps in a mathematics
teaching methods or content course or in a professional development course focused on
noticing student’s mathematical thinking.

One affordance this technology demonstrated was a way for teachers to immerse
themselves in student’s mathematical thought beyond what they would see in the
classroom. Our technology isolated a teacher-student interaction to its essence, and
thereby served as a mechanism for a teacher to engage in active listening of student
thinking and extend a student’s mathematical thinking. In order to accomplish this, we
will hereafter present this tool as an opportunity to probe and extend student thinking
and not as an assessment tool.

In our analysis, we were correct in predicting that teachers would either respond to the
student’s strategy video with either a clarification and verification question. Both these
types of communication were a teacher’s way to probe deeper about the student’s
strategy. That the teachers used either one of these types of questions was not surprising
and showed, on the surface, how teachers were attending to and interpreting a student’s
mathematical thinking (Jacobs et al., 2010).

The ways teachers engaged in responding to student’s mathematical thinking with either
extension or redirection communication was surprising. Two of our three teachers
decided to redirect, indicating that they might not be attending to and interpreting
student thinking, but rather listening to see if the student’s strategy matched their own.
According to Jacobs and colleagues, attending to children’s strategies includes being able
to recall the mathematical details of the strategies in order to discern children’s
understandings of a particular concept.

Interpreting student thinking includes having consistent reasoning about a student’s

understanding and a specific strategy that is connected to research on mathematical
development. Therefore, by redirecting, the teachers may not have had well-developed
noticing skills of attending and interpreting. Their communications with the student did
not focus on the mathematical details of the student’s strategy, was evaluative, and
focused on general teaching and learning. Therefore, through this technology, we can see
how some teachers might focus more on a redirection-focused response rather than on
expanding the student’s thinking.

Justin, on the other hand, showed a different response by attempting to extend the
student’s thinking. Earlier, we wondered if this difference was due to the ways each
teacher viewed the purpose of this technology. Did they see it as a diagnostic tool for

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helping struggling students or a communication tool for engaging students in a

mathematical conversation? The latter is the far more useful purpose of this technology, a
way for teachers and students to engage in mathematical dialog that extends the student’s
mathematical thinking in ways that might be difficult to do in the classroom.

As we continue our work using technology to assist in teacher noticing of student

mathematical thinking, we must caution that using this type of technology to diagnose or
assess student thinking robs both teacher and student of the opportunity to engage in
open mathematical dialog, of the opportunity to actually do math together. Rather,
technology for teacher noticing of student mathematical thinking must give students
agency to articulate, revise, and extend their own thinking. Only then will the technology
serve as a helpful tool for mathematics learning, rather than another means to ignore a
student’s voice.

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Author Notes

Theodore Chao
The Ohio State University
Email: [email protected]

Eileen Murray
Montclair State University
Email: [email protected]

Jon R. Star
Harvard University
Email: [email protected]

Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education is an online journal. All text, tables, and figures in
the print version of this article are exact representations of the original. However, the original article may also
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