Noticing instructional challenges in artifacts of teaching

Abstract This study investigates challenges of enactment teachers notice when analyzing artifacts of teaching in a professional development focused on supporting the enactment of NGSS‐aligned modeling instruction. Five secondary science teachers participated in a semester‐long video club. Transcripts of the segments of their meetings in which they analyzed artifacts of practice were coded to characterize what they noticed in videos and student work samples from their own and others’ classrooms of students engaging in sensemaking. Through an inductive and iterative approach, three main linguistic challenges were identified related to the teachers’ noticing of students’ disciplinary thinking: learning how to communicate with precision using modeling conventions, how to communicate with precision using scientific vocabulary, and how to support students explaining and defending their models. The findings of this study extend and affirm prior research on teachers’ noticing of student thinking by highlighting the integrated nature of disciplinary noticing and the entanglement of learning science concepts and the language of science. The results also indicate that artifact‐rich professional development designed to improve science teachers’ interpretation of their students’ thinking can support teachers as they work through problems of practice they encounter in their attempts to enact responsive science teaching.