Book Review: Developing habits of noticing in literacy and language classrooms

‘Teacher noticing’ in language arts and literacy education is the focus of this edited volume, in which cases from several sites around the world are used to illustrate the potential of ‘noticing’ for teacher professional learning. The book’s focus on language arts and literacy is a welcome contribution given that mathematics education and science education have dominated in the work on teacher noticing (König et al., 2022: 9).

The conceptualisation of ‘teacher noticing’, as outlined in chapter 1 and elaborated throughout the book, builds upon the everyday idea of paying attention and invests this with a richer meaning related to professionally informed and intentional attending to learners, learning and instruction. Teacher noticing of this kind is argued (for example, in ch.2) to be one of the hallmarks of expert teaching. An expert teacher is one who recognises (attends to) and interprets meaningful moves made by children in their learning, and responds adaptively with appropriate understanding and purpose for moving learning forward. In this volume, the concept of teacher noticing is explored both as a tool for educators and as a theoretical lens through which to interpret data. In the latter sense, for example, ‘noticing’ is used to interpret the intentions of historical research such as careful observations of children’s emergent literacy behaviours in the work of Marie Clay (ch.3).

Teacher noticing research is inclusive of, but not limited to, practitioner noticing of children’s learning and development. Early childhood educators have long been encouraged to ‘notice’ as a key professional practice. In this book, a further important dimension is explored: teachers learning to notice their own beliefs and actions. The book is therefore not just about observing what children are doing in their literacy learning. Rather, the potential impact of noticing is extended to consider how it might promote teacher agency within policy contexts of high regulation and compliance. When the trend in many jurisdictions seems to be towards “centralised, top-down approaches” (p. 5) to teaching literacy, it is argued that noticing research and practice can help to articulate how teachers are – and need to be, as a moral choice (ch.4) – responsive and intentional, adjusting curriculum and pedagogy to learners’ strengths, needs, and contexts.

Noticing in this broader sense can operate as a call to educators to bring to consciousness their own pedagogical decisions, fostering dispositions of openness to responding differently. Teacher noticing may therefore serve as a tool for educator reflexivity. In various places the book documents how noticing practices can shift over time through processes of “reflective critique” (ch.8, p. 145) from a novice’s lower, largely descriptive noticing (focusing on what was observed), towards “transformational noticing” (e.g., ch.2, p. 37) where teaching is deliberately more responsive to children, their emergent understandings and contexts. Observation itself is not enough. As Parr notes (ch. 3) when recounting a literacy project in New Zealand, teachers who improved their observing did not necessarily know how to respond: “for noticing to be effective, it needed to be operationalised” (p. 44).

Chapters 2 to 8 present case studies from diverse places, with aspects of noticing theory elaborated as relevant. Some ideas appear several times, although the chapters provide distinctive angles on noticing to interpret each of their studies. One benefit of this approach is that readers making selective use of the volume will find that individual chapters have integrity as stand-alone readings. These chapters include four in which case studies involve pre-service teachers - novices in teacher noticing. Thus the volume offers potentially strategic ideas for readers seeking to develop teacher noticing capacities in beginning teachers, although it also means that there is comparatively less space given to studies of expert professional noticing.

Given the book’s emphasis on teacher development and reflexivity, an important contribution of the case studies is to offer inspiration along with practical strategies for teacher professional learning. One audience for this book would be faculty working in teacher education. Select chapters would also be suitable as readings for pre-service teachers. Case study evidence is presented to show how pre- and in-service teachers benefit from programs which explicitly equip them to notice their own and others’ work, such as observing and reflecting upon literacy and language-related teaching during professional experience placements. Among the potentially transferable ideas from these case studies are examples of observation and reflection protocols, including journal-keeping and ethnographic notetaking when observing peers. Questions or prompts which facilitated reflection in post-observation conferences are noted. Here a possible criticism might be raised - namely that some content is about noticing in general, with less emphasis than might be expected on the teaching of language arts and literacy. For example, Chapter 6’s focus on students taking a Classroom Observation subject in their TESOL course in Mexico is mainly useful for its commentary on learning to observe and give feedback. A different emphasis specifically on the teaching of literature is presented in chapter 8, where Simpson applies a noticing framework to analyse focus group data collected before and after pre-service teachers enacted ‘literature circles’ in their university tutorials. The activity was a simulation of a dialogic classroom practice. Pre-service teachers experienced how literature circle protocols can foster engagement and comprehension of quality texts, and reflected on the importance of learning design.

A strong ethic of educational equity runs through the book. Chapter 5 describes the cross-cultural experiences of US teacher interns undertaking a professional experience placement abroad, working in a context of poverty and cultural and language difference in South Africa. The experience of teaching cross-culturally is one that many pre-service teacher education programs offer their students. In these contexts, ‘noticing’ can be used as an invitation to recognise personal bias, and to critique one’s own assumptions. For example, a student reported that observing lessons taught in Afrikaans “helped me realize how difficult it is to learn in a classroom not in your native language” (p. 87) – an important (if not surprising) realisation and one likely relevant to her future teaching practice, given the student diversity in many educational settings. In a similar vein, chapter 4 reports on professional learning of in-service teachers in Scotland as they applied the ‘Strathclyde Three Domain Model’ of literacy to help address the attainment gap for inner city disadvantaged students. The model recognises the importance of cognitive abilities such as decoding and comprehending, along with the role of identity in becoming a reader, and how literate practices and values around literacy as cultural capital vary across communities. This chapter builds upon ideas familiar to many early childhood educators such as ‘funds of knowledge’. Findings include some positive shifts in teacher understandings towards a more assets-based view of diverse learners’ language and literacy development. The chapter, like several others, also includes practical ideas for teaching – such as valuing what students read at home and encouraging friendship groups of readers keen to engage with similar texts. While the intention of the book is not as a practical manual for teachers, these are welcome suggestions for practice.

An ethic which values adapting curriculum and pedagogy to children’s noticed strengths and needs is, however, potentially ‘at risk’ under contemporary policy pressures. This is highlighted in chapter 7, where Sigþórsson gives an account of the ‘Beginning Literacy’ initiative in Iceland. The account describes interesting aspects of the program from case studies in Year 1 and 2 classrooms including teaching reading using authentic texts, and scaffolding writing. The author identifies tensions between this adaptive approach to implementing curriculum and an official policy discourse “exclusively linked with the PISA results” (p. 128). In the concluding chapter, it is commented that in such contexts “noticing can be construed either as an endangered practice or as an active disrupter – an antidote to standardisation and simplistic, formulaic teaching” (p. 158).

This book is an encouragement to teacher educators to consider how noticing research might enrich their programs. It offers illustrations of teachers cultivating positive dispositions and skills for reflecting on practice and developing as agentive professionals. The book’s examples of teacher noticing in practice provide helpful illustrations of noticing theory, and I would argue that this connection with theory is what allows the book to speak beyond specific cases to wider implications. There is definitely potential for more research on teacher noticing in the area of language arts and literacy, which is something this volume recognises and will hopefully help to promote.