An Analysis of Elementary School Teachers’ Attending: Focusing on Strength-Based Framing and Deficit-Based Framing

Attending to students’ mathematical strengths is an important practice for teachers; however, it can be challenging given the prevailing emphasis on students’ deficits. While this background can make it difficult for teachers to attend students' strengths, it is important for teachers to attend both strengths and deficits in students' mathematical thinking, as noticing can be shaped by how teachers framing their students' mathematical thinking. In response, this study was designed to help elementary school teachers experience the process of noticing through both deficit-based and strength-based framing. We compared and contrasted how these two framings of noticing influenced the teachers’ subsequent attention to students’ mathematical thinking and problem-solving processes with different achievement levels. The findings indicate that after teachers experienced both deficit-based and strength-based framings, they tended to maintain a deficit-based orientation yet simultaneously recognized certain strengths in students’ solutions of comparable complexity. In addition, teachers tended to focus more on shortcomings in the work of higher-achieving students, while some sought commendable aspects in the work of lower-achieving students. Although teachers acknowledged the importance of a strength-based framing from an affective perspective, they found it difficult to identify praiseworthy elements in problem-solving results that contained errors. Based on these results, this study discusses implications for research on noticing and for the integration of both deficit-based and strength-based framings in mathematics education.