Professional development of a secondary school mathematics teacher in the context of noticing

Effective mathematics instruction requires recognizing students' prior knowledge, common understanding and misconceptions, learning difficulties related to the concepts, their interests, and how they think. Because each student structures knowledge differently, the more aware a teacher is of student thinking, the more effective she can be. In this study, it was aimed to examine the professional development of a middle school mathematics teacher by analyzing the teaching process within the framework of her noticing skills. For this purpose, the process was designed as an action research; It progressed cyclically through watching lecture videos by the research committee, teacher' s reflections that were written through watching the lecture videos, with feedbacks from the research committee to these stages. When the data, collected through the video recordings of the teaching processes, the reflections written by the teacher and the clinical interviews, were analyzed by content analysis method. Through the feedback given in the research, it was observed that teachers' noticing skills within the context of mathematical learning opportunities (MLO) developed; in this context, it was determined that she made significant progress in focusing student thinking in teaching, focusing on understanding mathematics by questioning students' thoughts, managing classroom discussions and reflective thinking skills. The dimensions used in the analysis of noticing skill are grouped under four levels. In line with the data obtained from the reflections, it was observed that the teacher moved from the basic level which was the first level to the focused level which was the third level.