Learning to Notice Critical Moments in L1 Teaching: The potential of video-based mentoring conversations during fieldwork

Abstract

This study argues that to educate first language (L1) teachers who are responsive to students’ needs, we must pay attention to the invisible but fundamental processes of teacher noticing. Teacher noticing—how teachers perceive, interpret, and make decisions about how to respond to student ideas and needs during teaching—is scarcely studied within language and literature education. In this qualitative study, I examine the characteristics of mentoring conversations in which teacher candidates and their mentors discuss videos of the candidates’ L1 teaching in terms of the critical moments (Myhill & Warren, 2005) they attended to, their interpretations of these critical moments, and their decision-making on how to respond to these moments. The findings show that the candidates and mentors attended to various opportunities to scaffold student text production and interpretation, as well as opportunities to elicit and respond to student ideas in text-based discussions. Adopting an evaluative stance toward these critical moments supported the candidates in identifying alternative teaching moves, while adopting an inquiry stance led them to identify the first paths toward more adaptive teaching. These findings suggest that video-based mentoring conversations have the potential to support L1 teacher candidates in learning to notice and have implications for teacher education coursework and fieldwork.