Chapter 17: Lessons Learned From Studying The Teacher Intended Curriculum: The Value of Capturing and Analyzing Attention

Our research focuses on the teacher intended curriculum with the goal of understanding how teachers use curriculum materials to plan lessons. In this chapter, we discuss how we overcame the challenge of studying the teacher intended curriculum by exploring teachers’ noticing of the College Preparatory Mathematics (CPM) instructional materials for high-school mathematics and Go Math instructional materials for middle-school mathematics. Without being able to physically see what teachers see, our main challenges included: (1) knowing what teachers are looking at, especially when they are silent or quickly scrolling on a computer; (2) knowing how long, how often, and in what order teachers are looking at various aspects of materials; (3) knowing what teachers are NOT attending to; and (4) understanding what teachers are talking about during planning. Visualizations, together with eye-tracking video and eye-tracking metrics, allowed us to overcome these challenges and better understand teachers’ attention. Thus, we were supported in understanding teachers’ interpretations and responses to piece together a comprehensive story of teachers’ transformation of the intended curriculum to the teacher intended curriculum. The overarching lesson for readers is that being able to physically see what teachers are seeing matters.