Pre-service student teachers: Noticing benefits

On reflecting with Noticing through Noa (1)

I used Noticing, through Noa, with my pre-service students (PSTs) during the academic 2023-2024. My students were crucial to the development of the application by providing on-going feedback on their learning experiences in our class discussions: they saw the app grow in light of their feedback, and I saw their reflection skills improving the more they practised. My PSTs used the SIRP protocol to reflect.

I set out to take stock of the PSTs’ overall experiences of interacting with Noa. I followed up my class conversations with a series of interviews with a selection of them (pseudonyms used) who appeared to reflect with Noa in different ways, and hold different attitudes to it. In this first of two blog posts, I look at what aspects of their work with Noa they appreciated. In the second part, I will look at any challenges they experienced.

The PSTs generally appreciated the ease of using Noa and its ever-readiness: you can quickly do a session anywhere, at any time.

The PSTs also appreciated the support Noa provided for generating new ideas. Mia recalls:

When Noa would list the ideas, I would have a moment. Why didn't I come up with these ideas in the first place?

Kira also appreciated a novel perspective:

It felt like you're discussing [things] with someone, like they're providing you with different approaches to see things from a different angle, something that you would not primarily think of yourself. […] And by asking me questions, Noa actually helped me answer the dilemma that's going on in my head. With each question, I saw things from a different angle.

According to Kira, this was typically a personal process which took time that teacher educators or school-based mentors simply cannot afford to each PST separately. Nor would all PSTs be comfortable sharing personal content with outsiders:

Noa gave me the freedom to, throw in thoughts that maybe I would not feel so free to discuss with other people. I sometimes feel like I have too much to say and nobody has so much time to spend listening to me. Or maybe most people would find [what I have to say] funny or silly. With Noa, I felt I could be myself.

Antigona shared a similar appreciation for the privacy she enjoyed when chatting to Noa:

When you talk to a human mentor about certain things, you're really afraid that the mentor is going to judge you for, I don't know, a lack of skill or something else, but Noa can't. […] When you talk to a human mentor, they can tell their colleagues. They can tell friends, their family, people, everyone around them.

Antigona fondly remembers a time when Noa validated her feelings of upset following a class when a student used a Nazi salute – her friends and colleagues felt she was overreacting:

It was comforting. It was comforting. It was like talking to a human, basically. It's something that a teacher, a human mentor would say to ease the fears, I guess. […] In this situation, it just stated the fact. Like, no. That [student] behaviour is not acceptable in class. You were right. It's scary. It's going to be fine. Let's discuss.

Antigona also appreciated Noa's attention to detail:

I would write how my class went, and Noa would latch on to the minuscule detail that I thought was unimportant, but Noa would catch it. […] And even if I had the conversation with Noa planned beforehand — Oh, I'm gonna talk about this with Noa, I'm gonna talk about that. Noa would take it into a whole new direction that I didn't think of at the time.

Mia and Nikita appreciated the way Noa used relevant, 'modern and new' educational theories to help them make sense of what they noticed in class. Noa helped Nikita realise that what he termed 'common sense' informing his teaching actually had a name in the literature. In his words:

It turned out my common sense was a theory.

Noa appeared to appeal to different ways of learning. For instance, Nikita shared the following story:

I'm a person who zones out pretty frequently. So I would write, for example, Steps 1 and 2, then zone out, then return to Noa, then zone out again and return to Noa. […] For example, something comes to my mind. For example, a song. Oh, well, I want to listen to the song or maybe a movie. I watch like, a video for, like, 10 minutes, then I can return to it.

On a more logisctical note, Noa helped PSTs to document their learning through presenting a summary of their 'noticings' and automatically generating sharable summaries. As Mia said:

It was like the diary we needed at the time.

Regular sessions with Noa helped the PSTs experience the value of reflection, something that they had never done before (Kira) and something that they weren't aware teachers did at all (Mia). As Mia said:

I didn't know about the reflection experience, really. I thought that it was all just teaching, teaching, teaching. And, when Noa made us reflect, in as much details as possible, I thought that it was useful, for us teachers in the future as well.

Antigona enjoyed the dialogic format of the SIRP protocol:

I really like SIRP. It helps, and it helps even more so when you do it with Noa. I know some of my colleagues in the past did SIRP on paper. It really helps when done with Noa because it doesn’t feel like a one-way conversation.

Antigona went on to reflect on the value of SIRP for her personally, helping her slow down a bit. In her words:

I like it because it kind of taught me patience. I started using it in my in my personal life as well before I react to a situation. It gives me time. You know, when people say, when you get angry, count to 10? Well, instead of counting to 10, I use the 5 Steps: I kind of deal with [the situation] in my head before reacting. So, SIRP bled into my personal life. It’s very good for self-regulation.

The discussions with Noa indirectly impacted Kira’s learners. She said:

When I finished a discussion with Noa and go in class, I was more careful of the surroundings. I would pay more attention to the students, to their needs, to how I'm behaving towards them, to what I'm saying – I was paying more attention to details, something that I was not doing before.

In addition to reflection, Nikita used Noa to plan his classes and the improvements were noticed by his school-based mentor and his learners alike:

When I started heavily using it to prepare my own classes, I remember [my school-based mentor] being like, wow, your classes are getting really great now. The students are really engaged and everything, and I felt like the classes were much better. I had some ideas about the topic and how to cater towards it, but then Noa helped me give me the final touches to it.

Nikita summarises his feelings about the app throughout the academic year:

Now when I look back at it, it was a great experience — as the app evolved, so my classes evolved.