ABSTRACT
To a certain extent, every teacher engages in acts of noticing. However, there is evidence that expert teachers’ noticing skills are more refined than those of novices (Berliner, 2001). For example, when asked to view a series of slides taken in mathematics and science classrooms, expert teachers were able to apply richer schemata than were novices to make sense of the visual information provided. They used their knowledge of classrooms and instructional strategies to focus their attention on important elements of the images and to make multiple hypotheses and interpretations of what they saw. Novice teachers were more hesitant in their descriptions of what was depicted in the images, and their interpretations were not always as accurate and rich as those provided by experts (Carter, Cushing, Sabers, Stein, & Berliner, 1988). Similarly, when viewing videotapes of classroom instruction, expert teachers could monitor, understand, and interpret multiple events occurring in the classroom in more detail and with more insight than novices (Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991).
