Decomposing the Complex Practice of Whole Class Instructional Decision Making

The Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, 2011) was used to design practice-based activities for preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) taking an integrated elementary content and methods course which focused on developing the PSETs' teacher noticing of students' mathematical thinking (Jacobs et al., 2010). This paper presents a case study that describes how PSETs in the course made use of their noticing of individual student thinking to make whole-class instructional decisions when provided with classroom vignettes that included individual student work samples as representations of practice. Results provide insight into the usefulness of providing PSETs with various frameworks to guide their noticing responses and decompose their instructional decision making. Differences between the PSETs' noticing and whole-class decisions are discussed and recommendations for teacher education programs are provided.