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Responsive instruction—or instruction that foregrounds and takes up the disciplinary substance of student thinking—is both a hallmark of recent STEM education reforms and challenging to enact. This kind of instruction may be especially challenging in instructional contexts that mandate or rely on curriculum with set, structured learning trajectories for students. In this paper, we propose a new component of curricular knowledge—in particular, an understanding of the purposes of questions or sequences of questions in research-based instructional materials. We show that this kind of curricular knowledge supported the enactment of responsive instructional practices among one cohort of 14 undergraduate physics Learning Assistants, illustrating the relationship between curricular knowledge and responsive instruction. We document some of the key phases in and tools that supported the development of this cohort's curricular knowledge, lending insight into how teacher educators might support the development of curricular knowledge in their own contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas—the meaning students are making—and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized framings of their classroom activity—their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]