ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on building teachers’ content knowledge through professional development. Through our leadership-preparation project (Researching Mathematics Leader Learning [RMLL]), we are creating resources for leaders of professional development to engage teachers with mathematics by solving and discussing solutions to mathematical tasks. We aim to support leaders in cultivating mathematically rich learning environments for teachers by focusing leaders on the normative ways teachers engage with mathematical explanation. Our approach to making sense of leaders’ thinking is based on the contention that we need to identify important features in professional development for leaders if they are to reason about, act on, and learn from these professional development experiences. Research on teacher noticing supports this goal through a focus on identifying and making sense of complex teaching situations (Jacobs, Lamb, Philipp, & Schappelle, 2009; Sherin, 2007; Star & Strickland, 2007). In particular, Jacobs and colleagues (2009) described three components of teachers’ noticing that are relevant to our work with leaders: attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond. In their work, the three components relate to teachers’ noticing of children’s mathematical thinking. In our work, the three components relate to our own noticing of leaders’ thinking while they participated in professional development. In other words, we focus on our noticing as leaders of leaders (LOLs). In this chapter, we show how our noticing of leaders’ thinking about videocases of teachers engaged in mathematics in professional development helped us consider novel ways to support leaders in facilitating mathematical tasks in professional development. We argue for the importance and utility of developing a framework to orient leaders to a particular and focused purpose for engaging in mathematics with teachers. How phenomena are framed is of central concern in understanding the disciplined perception that expertise builds (Erickson, 2007; Stevens & Hall, 1998).
