Come out on Thursday, March 26th, from 6:00PM* to 7:30PM for the First-Year Teaching Panel. UGA Math Ed graduates will share their first-year experience. Food and drinks will be provided. Location to be announced soon.
Abstract:
In this talk, I will discuss ways I have worked to support teacher noticing of student algebraic thinking. In particular, I will discuss a video club professional development I designed that included an algebraic thinking framework describing ways students might think algebraically, with the goal of encouraging teachers to attend to a broader range of student algebraic thinking. I found that preservice teachers who participated in the video club intervention discussed a wider range of algebraic thinking (i.e., connecting representations, modeling phenomena) than they had before the intervention, and they discussed this thinking on a more substantive level. I will then discuss two current projects that extend this prior work. In one project, I begin to explore teachers’ attention to multimodal (gesture and action) student thinking, as teachers engage with novel video annotation tools. In another new project, I explore algebraic thinking elicited in elementary classrooms as children program robots, and how teachers can learn to support this student engagement.
Bio:
Janet is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Mathematics Education (CfME) at the University of Maryland. She earned her Doctorate from Northwestern University in the Learning Sciences in 2013. She also holds an MS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Before enrolling in graduate school, Janet taught secondary mathematics for ten years and earned National Board Certification in 2003.
Janet’s research interests include teacher noticing and teacher responsiveness in the mathematics classroom. In particular, she is interested in how teachers attend to and make sense of student thinking and other student resources including but not limited to student dispositions and students’ ways of communicating mathematics. Janet’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the US Department of Education. Janet is a recent recipient of the NSF early CAREER award to study teacher noticing of multimodal student algebraic thinking. Her work appears in journals such as the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, Mathematics Teacher, and the Journal of the Learning Sciences, among others.