In teacher education, the importance of teacher’s learning has come to be obvious.  Past studies on teacher education have focused on teachers’ knowledge or their belief as the important factor of teacher’s learning.  Moreover, teacher’s learning community has been paid attention based on social constructivism.

  On the other hand, recent school learning has been increasing complexity.  With the educational reform, teachers have been required to work together with local community or other professions.  For example, in Japan, the introduction of the integrated learning (e.g. social welfare, information literacy, international education) required teachers to collaborate with the professions of the other fields because they had little knowledge about teaching topics.  In this situation, teachers appear to have to work together with other field professions in all teaching phases; lesson planning, implementing the lesson plan, and evaluation. That means teacher’s learning becomes the inter-profession learning. 

  To facilitate the inter-profession learning, the ‘professional vision (Goodwin, 1994)’ appears to be important, not just teacher’s knowledge or belief.  Professional vision is the ability to notice of a practice that is valued by a particular social group (van Es & Sherin, 2008, p.244).  Goodwin (1994) said that professional vision consists of socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group, and the participants build and contest it by applying a set of discursive practices (dividing the domain of scrutiny by highlighting a figure against a ground, applying specific coding schemes for the interpretation of relevant events, etc.) to phenomena in the domain of scrutiny (p.606).  So, teacher’s professional vision is thought to affect how to collaborate with other field professions in teaching.

  Teachers’ professional vision is the specialized knowledge that would enable them to make sense of what was happening in their classrooms through selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning (Borko et al., 2008, p.419).  Seidel and Stürmer (2014) modeled it as the integrated knowledge which is constructed by the two aspects of ‘noticing’ and ‘reasoning’ in order to provide a useful measure of this ability.

  As to the teachers’ ‘noticing’ skill, van Es and Sherin (2002)’ s definition by the following three key aspects is widely used (p.573):
(a) identifying what is important or noteworthy about a classroom situation
(b) making connections between the specifics of teaching and learning they represent
(c) using what one knows about the context to reason about classroom interactions

  And ‘reasoning’ skill by Seidel and Stürmer (2014)’s model is considered as the ability of differentiating between following three aspects (p.745):
(a) the ability to clearly differentiate the relevant aspects of a noticed teaching and learning component without making any further judgments (Description)
(b) the ability to use what one knows to reason about a situation (Explanation)
(c) the ability predict the consequences of observed events in terms of student learning (Prediction)

  In brief, teachers’ professional vision is significant for teachers to assess their teaching situation and decide their next teaching behavior.  And it is considered that their professional vision can be found in their noticing and reasoning about specific lesson situation.

  Above all, the purpose of this study is to describe the nature of teachers’ professional vision that can be the future important factor of teachers’ learning.

Borko, H., Jacobs, J., Eiteljorg, E. & Pittman, M. E. (2008). Video as a tool for fostering productive discussions in mathematics professional development, Teaching and teacher Education, 24(2), 417-436. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision, American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606-633. Seidel, T. & Stürmer, K. (2014). Modeling and measuring the structure of professional vision in preservice teachers, American Educational Research Journal, 51(4), 739-771. van Es, E. A. & Sherin, M.G. (2002). Learning to notice: scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions, Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571-596. van Es, E. A & Sherin, M. G. (2008). Mathematics teachers’ “learning to notice” in the context of video club. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(2), 244-276.