The perception of affordances; towards an ecological-enactive model of teacher noticing, expertise and development

ABSTRACT

This article builds on nascent ecological approaches to teacher noticing by drawing on the ecological psychology and enactivist concept of ‘affordance’ – meaning opportunity for action – and offers a new definition of teacher noticing; the perception of affordances. This perspective provides a deeper understanding of what noticing is, particularly why it is so fundamentally situated, and moreover provides a mechanism by which expert noticing is acquired and thereby points to concrete ways in which noticing can be developed. I argue that an ecological-enactive approach offers a productive, and more comprehensive model of teacher noticing.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• ecological psychology
• enactivism
• professional development
• noticing
• expertise

The teaching environment in which teachers must perform is often complex, dynamic and underdetermined. There are at any given moment many claims on the teacher’s attention and often not enough information nor time to make deliberative, fully considered decisions. Much of the skill of teaching lies not in the ability to process as much information as possible in a teaching situation, but in the ability to selectively attend to what is important and deciding what to do about it. This conception of teaching practice is reflected in the growing body of literature employing terms like noticing (Schack et al. 2017, van Es and Sherin 2021) vision (Wolff et al. 2016, Meschede et al. 2017, Wyss et al. 2021), sight or seeing (Edwards and Protheroe 2003, Aspbury-Miyanishi 2024), attention and responsiveness (Richards et al. 2020), attention-dependent knowledge (Ainley and Luntley 2007) and expert viewing (Miller, 2011). The concepts, which for the sake of simplicity I will refer to simply as noticing, broadly speaking refer to the specialised ways in which teachers (or professionals) selectively attend to relevant features and events of their teaching environment and make sense of them (Sherin et al. 2011, Choy and Dindyal 2020, van Es and Sherin 2021). This selective attention and sensemaking in turn inform teachers’ decision-making during teaching practice from the broad level of lesson planning and to the moment-to-moment interactions with students (Santagata 2011, Sherin et al. 2011). Noticing, according to Sherin et al. (2011), should not be considered a category of knowledge, but as a process. From this perspective, what makes the expert different from the novice is not the knowledge they possess, but that they pay attention differently, make sense of what they attend to differently, and so respond in more pedagogically effective ways (Shepard 1995, Barnhart and van Es 2015, Wolff et al. 2016, Simpson et al. 2017, Richards et al. 2020, Wyss et al. 2021, Bastian et al. 2022).

The concept of noticing, as a theory of teaching practice or teacher cognition, is still evolving and has yet to arrive at what Sherin and Star (2011) refer to as a more ‘complete’ model of teacher noticing which might begin to address emergent issues and tie together increasingly complex and disparate conceptualisations (Scheiner 2016). One important move in the evolution of the concept, taken to differing degrees by noticing scholars, has been a shift from a predominantly cognitive approach – focusing on the thought processes of teachers – to their situated perception, action and interaction in a contingent and dynamic environment (Erickson 2011, Hoth et al. 2016, Santagata and Yeh 2016, Scheiner 2016, 2020, Richards et al. 2020, Jazby et al. 2022, van Driel et al. 2023). This increased concern for situated and interactive nature of teaching practice is reflected in a turn towards ecological psychology, notably by Jazby (2021), Jazby et al. (2022), Scheiner (2016, 2020) and myself (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021, 2024). The ‘ecological’ perspective of noticing is still inchoate, yet it does have the potential to provide the more ‘complete’ model of noticing called for by Sherin and Star (2011).

In this article, I continue the trend away from a cognitive view, towards a fundamentally situated and action-oriented view teacher noticing. I build on the nascent ecological perspective but also incorporate insights from the related field of enactivism, thereby developing what could be called an ecological-enactive model. I do this by introducing the concept of affordance – coined by ecological psychologist James Gibson – to articulate the inextricable link between perception and action. The ecological-enactive perspective I sketch out offers a parsimonious but consequential definition of noticing; the perception of affordances. This affordance-based perspective takes us much closer to a more complete model in noticing in the fact that with one basic process, it accounts for many of the characteristics of noticing such as its fundamental situatedness, its implicit and anticipatory nature, its cognitive opacity and its distinction from knowledge and more deliberative cognitive processes. Moreover, this perspective may be particularly useful as it proposes a mechanism by which expert noticing is acquired and points to specific ways in which noticing, and ultimately expertise, can be developed.

Ecological psychology and affordance

The term affordance has, since its coining by ecological psychologist J. Gibson (1986), developed a life of its own and is often used in a rather loose sense to refer to possible ways of using digital technology. Such usage is often decoupled from the perception-action context in which Gibson proposed the term. This article uses the term in its ecological psychology sense and refers not to properties of digital tools but to the relation between perception and action. Ecological psychology (EP), pioneered by Gibson (1986), is a situated, embodied and non-representational approach to cognition. EP has drawn on Gestalt psychology and phenomenology and explicitly challenged the dominant dichotomies in psychology like organism/environment and perception/action (Lobo et al. 2018). From an ecological psychology perspective, an agent always acts within a particular environment which enables and constraints certain actions and as such, it is impossible to conceive of an agent independent of its environment. Teaching is no different; one cannot understand the activity of teaching without including the environment in which it happens. From an ecological perspective therefore, the appropriate focus of study for understanding teacher behaviour is the teacher-environment interaction (Jazby et al. 2022).

EP views perception as active; as a means of actively exploring the environment rather than passively taking in information. Perception and action are also intrinsically linked and should be understood as inseparable parts of the same activity (Lobo et al. 2018). Perception is for action and action makes possible more perception in what are referred to as perception-action cycles. Gibson (1986) conceptualised the link between perception and action in his neologism of affordance. According to Gibson, affordances are what the environment offers, provides or affords the organism. For example, chairs afford sitting. What one perceives is not the chair as such, but a place to sit: the meaning or value of such objects to an agent consists in what action they afford us (Michaels and Carello 1981, Gibson 1986).

Affordances, according to Chemero’s (2003) refinement of the term, are not fixed properties of the environment nor properties of the agent. That is, they are not objective facts about the environment, but nor are they subjective dispositions that inhere within the agent. They are emergent relations between an agent’s capabilities and the regularities and features of their environment. This relational nature means that each agent inhabits their own ecological niche made up of affordances relevant to their way of life and particular capabilities. Individual actions are at once made possible and constrained by the affordances available to them (Gibson 1986). Teaching practice is, in this view, not so much a product of the endogenous mental activity of a teacher, but a product of the affordances available to them in a specific environment and is therefore fundamentally situated.

Gibson (1986) argued that we perceive affordances directly. That is to say, in contradistinction to information processing theories (e.g. Neisser 1976), we do not perceive the environment in terms ambiguous, underdetermined and inadequate sense-data which must be made sense of with the aid of mental representation. Rather, we perceive the environment as immediately meaningful; in terms of how it can be engaged with. To give a very basic example, a teacher does not perceive a cylinder of white and black plastic of certain dimensions and, with the aid stored knowledge about writing implements or mental manipulation and so on, infer that before them is a board pen which can, when one thinks about it, be put to use for writing. Instead, the teacher immediately perceives this constellation of environmental information as affording writing on the whiteboard (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021).

Moreover, perception is active in that agents seek out the information that specifies certain affordances through the control of attention. Attention is the means by which perceivers adaptively select from all available information, the information that specifies actions relevant to the current task (Gibson and Rader 1979, Michaels and Carello 1981, Shell and Flowerday 2019). In other words, attention ‘reveals’ affordances (Michaels and Carello 1981, van der Kamp et al. 2019). Much of the time, attention is proactive; through attention individuals ‘forage’ for information that specifies affordances relevant to their current goals (Constant et al. 2019). Teachers likewise forage for information; they look out and listen out for specific information that allows them to act in certain ways and disattend to information deemed irrelevant (Miller 2011, van Es and Sherin 2021). Eye-tracking studies into teachers’ professional vision (noticing) appear to support the idea of attentional ‘foraging’; more experienced teachers appear to direct their gaze more selectively and more purposefully than novices (Wolff et al. 2016, Wyss et al. 2021).

Developing the concept of affordances

The concept of affordance has, since Gibson first proposed it, been developed in a number of ways, both within EP but also in broader multidisciplinary embodied, enacted, embedded and extended (‘4E Cognition’) approaches (Newen et al. 2018). Recent conceptualisations of affordances move beyond the sensorimotor coordination that Gibson was initially discussing and encompass the broader socio-cultural domain of human interactions and skilled practices (Reed 1996, Chemero 2003, Good 2007, Rietveld 2008, Costall 2012, Heft 2013, Ramstead et al. 2016, Bruineberg et al. 2019, Pyysiäinen 2021). Within the rich sociocultural environments we inhabit, we must learn not simply to perceive affordances, but to perceive which affordances are relevant to our socially contingent purposes and practices (Young et al. 2002, Rietveld 2008, Heft 2013, Ramstead et al. 2016). In other words, we must act in ways that are ‘appropriate from the point of view of social practice’ (Rietveld 2008, p. 973). This means firstly that the landscape of affordances available to individuals is to a large extend shaped the sociocultural environment – different cultures perceive different affordances. Secondly, there are conventional affordances (Costall 2012, Ramstead et al. 2016); ‘correct’ ways to engage with the environment. Costall (2012) gives the example of a chair which, even if I were to stand on it, would still conventionally afford sitting on and my standing on it could be intuitively understood as the ‘wrong’ way to engage with the chair. The presence of ‘sociocultural’ affordances allows for coordinated practices as we can expect others to perceive them and so behave in predictable ways without rule-following behaviour (Ramstead et al. 2016). The concept of a socioculturally shaped landscape of affordances reflects Goodwin’s (1994) concept of professional vision in which there are socially structured ways of perceiving specific to each practice.

Classrooms to a large extend depend on shared expectations – on the tacit assumption that certain affordances will be perceived by others. For example, both students and teachers in language classrooms largely expect, usually without ever needing it to be made explicit, that learners’ grammatical errors will be corrected. That is to say, student grammatical errors conventionally afford correcting (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021). The precise nature of the action will of course change culture to culture; in one educational culture, a student error might afford reprimanding, in another, encouragement. Thus, part of becoming a teacher involves learning to perceive the socioculturally appropriate, conventional affordances of a given educational context (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2022 also cf. Kazemi et al. 2016, König et al. 2022).

Enactivism, selectivity and grip

Enactivist perspectives on cognition, although sometimes at odds with EP, share the pragmatist roots and action-oriented emphasis of EP and have readily adopted the concept of affordance. Enactivism emphasises the role of dynamic coupling, through the perception of affordances, between an embodied agent and their environment (Gallagher 2018, Heras-Escribano 2021). Erik Rietveld has used the concept of affordance extensively together with phenomenological and enactive perspectives, in his development of a hybrid ecological-enactive approach to skilled human behaviour (Rietveld 2008, 2014, Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, Rietveld et al. 2018, Kiverstein et al. 2019, Kiverstein and Rietveld 2020, van Dijk and Rietveld 2021).

One key element of this view addresses how it is that an agent responds to a given affordance and not any other available affordance without engaging in mental representation or deliberate decision making. In Rietveld’s view, as a result of an agent’s past experiences, habits, capabilities and skills, and the purposes and concerns proper to socio-cultural behavioural settings in which the agent finds themselves, the situation is never perceived as neutral; the situation always matters to us in particular way (Rietveld 2008). As a consequence, certain affordances have different valences and affective attractiveness; certain affordances repel us and others attract and in fact solicit action from us and so we feel compelled to act in a certain way (Withagen et al. 2012, Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, Kiverstein et al. 2019). Thus, an agent does not need to think about what to do nor choose between affordances. Rather, they need only respond to those affordances which solicit action and by so doing act purposefully and intelligently but unreflectively; i.e. without conscious deliberation of what to do nor a conscious awareness of what they are doing (Dreyfus 2005, Dreyfus and Kelly 2007). This makes sense of the oft-observed phenomenon that expert teachers seem to have difficulty articulating both the what and the why of their own noticing (Edwards and Protheroe 2003, Miller 2011, Sherin and Star 2011, Jazby 2016).

Experienced teachers will no doubt recognise the experience of not actively deciding what to do and simply being pulled to act in certain ways that, as a result of their experiences and situated concerns, feel like the right, obvious, or perhaps only way to act in the moment. Indeed, a teacher in Sherin et al. (2011) study into teacher noticing neatly articulates this experience: ‘it’s almost a physical reaction … something pricks my senses’ (p. 79). Dreyfus (2005) calls this intuitive, non-intellectual-but-intelligent responsiveness to the needs of the environment ‘skilful coping.’ Expert teachers tend to stop and think about the situation only when skilful coping breaks down, i.e. when there is not enough environmental information to specify an appropriate affordance (Donnelly 1999, Garcia and Lewis 2014, Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021, Jazby et al. 2022). In this way, the more expert a teacher is, the less they we can expect them to engage in deliberate thinking and decision and when they do, it is always in the context and service of ongoing engagement with affordances (Gallagher 2018, Rietveld et al. 2018, Popova and Rączaszek-Leonardi 2020, Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021).

For Rietveld skilfulness resides in being selectively open only to solicitations relevant to the practice at hand. Skilled – or expert – agents are ‘selectively responsive’ only to those relevant affordances within the broad landscape of potential affordances offered by their environment (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2020, Rietveld 2008, Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; van Dijk and Rietveld 2021). In Rietveld’s (2008) terms, responsiveness to affordances is a ‘form of selective intelligence or cognition that is motivated by the situation’ (p. 975). Which affordances are relevant depends on the context; their particular behavioural setting and the particular concerns, purposes and preferences (de Haan et al. 2013, Young et al. 2002, Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014, Dings 2018). Thus, being a skilled teacher is about being selective responsive to those affordances which are relevant to the pedagogical purposes appropriate to the particular teaching and learning situation at hand (i.e. those which relate to student learning).

The field of relevant affordances is of course not static but dynamic. As the individual responds to the affordances, new affordances emerge themselves, and so their field of affordances dynamically evolves as the agent pursues their current goal (Young et al. 2002, van Dijk and Rietveld 2021). Moreover, the affordance landscape extends over multiple timescales and so part of skilful practice is anticipatory; understanding intuitively what affordances will become available if current affordances are acted on (de Haan et al. 2013, van Dijk and Rietveld 2021). Part of what makes one particular affordance solicit action from the skilled individual is the new information, and thus the new affordances, that acting on that affordance makes accessible. This reflects the enactivist principle that agents bring their perceptual world into being and sustain it through action, that is, they enact their world (Gallagher 2018, Popova and Rączaszek-Leonardi 2020). Through their action, a skilled teacher changes the affordance landscape so that more, or different actions are possible. This echoes van Es and Sherin’s (2021) notion of ‘shaping’ dimension of teacher noticing. A very simple example would be a teacher moving around the room in order to see what students are writing and thereby reveal affordances for correcting, guiding, praising and so on. A more complex example might be a teacher having the students perform a task, knowing the students will make certain mistakes, so that the teacher can respond to the mistakes in a way which leads to the sort of learning the teacher desires to achieve.

Rietveld et al. (2018) argue that what motivates this continual responsiveness to affordances is that the skilled expert is always trying to modify the situation in line with their concerns and purposes. Borrowing a term from phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) and Dreyfus (2002), Rietveld and colleagues (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, Rietveld et al. 2018) refer to this as a tendency towards an ‘optimal grip’ on the situation. The feeling of having a grip on the situation in this way is probably familiar to most experienced teachers; not so much about exerting control over events and students or sticking to a plan – often the concern of novice teachers – and more about being able to bring into being and shape the affordance landscape in service one’s pedagogical purposes. No doubt all teachers will also recall the frustration of not having a grip on teaching situations and, in Gottlieb (2012) words, ‘the feeling of confusion, the relentless fatigue born of such ferocious and conscious attempts to respond well to the dynamic situation of the classroom’ (p. 508).

Distal engagement with affordances

One challenge for an ecological-enactive approach is explaining how such selective responsiveness to affordances expands beyond the short-term, moment-to-moment interactions actual practice to the long-term, forward-thinking planning activities which are also part of expertise. The idea of anticipation of affordances goes some way to addressing this but Gallagher (2017) and Bruineberg et al. (2019) go further with the concept of imagination. For Gallagher (2017), purposeful imagination ‘is to manipulate concepts, thoughts, images … in order to solve a problem, or map them onto novel affordance spaces’ (p. 196). It is, according to Bruineberg et al. (2019), a form of anticipation based on our existing understanding of what generally happens and what can happen in a given context. In other words, experts can anticipate possibilities because of their familiarity with affordance landscapes. This probably makes intuitive sense to teacher educators; novice teachers often find it hard to imagine what learners will do moment to moment (and so are frequently surprised by classroom life) whereas expert teachers are very often able to anticipate learner behaviour, sometimes at an impressive temporal remove. The concept of imagination therefore reveals how even in lesson planning and other anticipatory activities, expert noticing can still be understood as responsiveness to affordances. The expert teacher’s experiential and intuitive understanding of what affordances are typically available and what affordances can be available enables them to plan, often very intuitively and ‘with efficiency, with comfort, with ease [and] to anticipate events of a lesson … [and thus] accommodate their students’ needs, challenges and interests’ (Farrell 2013, pp. 1077–8).

As with immediate engagement with affordances, purposeful imagination does not require deliberative cognitive processes such as reasoning. That said, just as expert teachers do engage in deliberative thinking in the midst of teaching when their intuitive responsiveness to affordances breaks down, expert teachers may often engage in deliberative thinking while purposefully imagining, but this thinking is always embedded in and is for engagement with affordances in real contexts in which the teaching regularly acts. Thus, even in what appear to be rather abstract and cerebral activities like lesson planning, the differences between an expert teacher and an inexpert teacher can still be understood as selective responsiveness to relevant affordances.

The education of attention

One pertinent question here is how individuals come to perceive affordances and how they develop the selective responsiveness to certain affordances. For Gibson (1986), we come to perceive the affordances we do through the ‘education of attention.’ Through exploratory behaviour, feedback from the environment and implicit or explicit direction of attention, over time individuals learn perceptually what environmental patterns, structures, relations and variables are relevant and what opportunities for action are associated with them (Szokolszky et al. 2019). In the teaching world, we generally refer to this as experience. Through countless teaching experiences involving trying new things, making mistakes, student reactions and responses, things not going as expected, guidance from peers, trainers and others, teachers’ attention is continually shaped in order to reveal the affordances relevant to their purposes. Their purposes also evolve to fit the affordance landscape they act in; teachers come to adopt pedagogic purposes that can be achieved within the affordance landscape they encounter.

The process of education of attention through experience, developed significantly by Eleanor Gibson (1969) is referred to as ‘perceptual learning.’ Perceptual learning is often described using the metaphor of ‘attunement’ since rather than acquiring more information about the environment, perceptual learning involves the individual becoming better at extracting relevant information and filtering out irrelevant information (Kellman and Garrigan 2009, Araújo and Davids 2011). Learning in this sense is not expanding the bandwidth or computation – increasing the amount of information that can be attended to and processed – but turning the dial to tune out the noise and tuning into the relevant signal, that is, narrowing attention to only what is relevant. van Es and Sherin (2021) and Miller (2011) reflect this when they note that learning to notice as a teacher involves learning to disattend to, or tune out, irrelevant information. Through this attunement, an individual comes to perceive some information as more (or less) relevant than they did before, perceive distinctions, patterns, relations and structures that they could not before, and to perceive as distinct what before may have been vague (Gibson 1969, 1986, Fadde 2009, Kellman and Garrigan 2009, van der Kamp et al. 2019, Szokolszky et al. 2019). Making finer distinctions allows for new affordances to be discovered, thereby increasing an individual’s ability to respond to situations, in other words, increasing their ability to maintain a grip on situations (van der Kamp et al. 2019).

In addition, since according to Young et al. (2002), intention ‘sets the focus of attention’ (p. 154), perceptual learning also involves the education of intention (Jacobs and Michaels 2007, Araújo and Davids 2011). Part of learning a skill involves learning what to intend moment-to-moment; what intermediate outcomes or states to work towards. Different ‘intentions-in-action’ (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012) make different affordances relevant (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021). For instance, the intention-in-action to have a student give a correct answer to a question may produce very different affordances to the intention-in-action of getting the students to understand how to answer the question. Many of the differences between expert and novice teachers can be found in these subtle differences in intention-in-action. Expert teachers often have subtly different intentions moment to moment, and through attention they seek out the information which specifies the affordances relevant to realising these intentions-in-action. In this way, the same ostensible activity or situation may give rise to radically different behaviours from the novice and expert teachers. To give a simplified example, where the novice may be focused on getting to the end of a textbook activity in a timely manner, the expert teacher may be focused on getting the students to display an understanding of the learning point of the activity and thereby being open to very different affordances and as a result, how the activity unfolds will be very different. Thus, shaping teachers’ intentions-in-action may be as important as guiding their attention.

Perceptual learning can also be prompted through the intentional education, or ‘guiding’, of attention and intention-in-action. This concept has been applied primarily to discrete skill development in sport contexts but also music and gaming (Wulf and Prinz 2001, Williams et al. 2003, Smeeton et al. 2005, Gopher 2006, Abernethy et al. 2007, Duke et al. 2011, Ryu et al. 2013, Hutto and Sánchez-García 2014, North et al. 2017, Otte et al. 2021, Woods et al. 2021). The central aim of these ‘guided attention’ strategies is to attune the learner to the right information and the right moment-to-moment outcomes or dynamic and then to allow them to reveal affordances for themselves, rather than telling them what to do. Although the skillsets required in sport contexts may be substantially different from teaching contexts, the principle at work in these studies, the guiding of attention and intention-in-action in a performance context, can also be applied to the learning of more complex skills like teaching (Young et al. 2002, Young 2004, Sebastian and Sánchez-García 2015, Aspbury-Miyanishi 2024).

Implications

One may fairly ask the question here of what an ‘ecological-enactive’ reconceptualisation of noticing brings beyond current conceptualisations for which there is a growing weight of empirical support. I argue that noticing as perception of affordances has a number of benefits; explanatory power, parsimony and a specific mechanism which can be leveraged for teacher development.

Most other conceptualisations of teacher noticing characterise noticing as being distinct from knowledge in some way (the theory-practice gap), as often difficult for teachers to explain and articulate, and as fundamentally situated, both in terms of goal-directed action and in terms of social context. The recent forays into ecological psychology of Jazby (2021) and Scheiner (2020) have begun to make sense of these characteristics within a single theoretical framework but the concept of affordances I have articulated here goes a step further by providing a simple, unifying explanation for why noticing has these features. Whatever declarative knowledge a teacher has, this is not necessarily related to their perception of affordances; their practice is the product of the affordances they perceive in specific teaching environments and simply having knowledge as such does not necessarily shape perception. We can say knowledge becomes ‘useable’ or ‘practical’ when a teacher perceives the affordances relevant to enacting that knowledge. Since learning to perceive affordances can often be an implicit process, expert noticing can often cognitively opaque and so an expert teachers can sometimes struggle to explain what they do and why, especially when they are out of the context itself. Affordances emerge in the relationship between a goal-directed agent and their specific sociomaterial environment and expertise is, therefore, inherently bound up with their in-the-moment purposes and is inherently tied to specific, socioculturally constructed environments in which there are normative ways of being a teacher. Noticing is therefore inherently situated and embedded and cannot be disassociated, studied and developed outside its context.

A common, but by no means agreed on, conceptualisation of noticing is a three-part cognitive model; attending to, interpreting/sensemaking, deciding what to do (Jacobs and Spangler 2017, Dindyal et al. 2021) from which action is supposed to follows. An ecological-enactive perspective collapses these distinct cognitive processes and the supposedly consequent action into a single perception-action process; the perception of affordances. Aside from its parsimony, such a view obviates the need to explain how these different processes interact (for instance, how does a teacher know to pay attention to something before they have made sense of it?) and moreover, explains how these conceptually different activities – attending, meaning-making and action – are in fact, to borrow Jacobs et al. (2010) phrase, ‘a single integrated teaching move’ (p. 173).

The ecological-enactive perspective also offers insight into what process underlies the acquisition of skill, and ultimately expertise. Teaching skill can be understood as selective responsiveness to pedagogically relevant affordances. Consequently, moving from novice to expert is a process of becoming progressively more attuned to relevant affordances. Attunement to affordances applies to teaching activity well beyond the unpredictable, largely reactive dynamics of classroom life. For example, lesson planning can be just as much a question of selective responsiveness to affordances, arising from engagement with the affordances perceived in materials, anticipating affordances planning for certain things to happen and anticipating affordances through imagination. Thus, responsiveness to affordances is a pervasive feature of skilled teaching practice as a whole. This expands the notion of noticing beyond the classroom and perhaps counters critiques of situated approaches, like that Nückles (2021), as over emphasising the reactive nature of classroom teaching at the expense of other contexts and aspects of teaching.

A significant implication of the reconceptualisation I have put forward here is a shift in emphasis from deliberative cognition to action-oriented perception. Skilled teaching practice is not founded on deliberative cognitive processes such as analysis, interpretation, reasoning, deliberate decision-making etc. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of skill is no longer needing to engage in deliberative thinking. When an expert teacher does engage in deliberative thinking, such as when there is a breakdown in their responsiveness to affordances or when imagining, it is in the context and service of their broader engagement with affordances. The novice, on the other hand, has no choice but to engage in deliberate thinking precisely because they are not yet responsive too relevant affordances. In addition, the perception of affordances is inherently situated in a goal-directed action context. As noted by Kavanagh et al. (2022) a classroom looks quite different when viewed from the perspective of a performer-of-teaching compared to that of an observer-of-teaching. In other words, the affordances one perceives when watching teaching are very different from those perceived when doing teaching. The proper focus, object of study and the means by which noticing is developed in an ecological-enactive approach is therefore, a teacher’s action-perception in their teaching environment, and not what or how they think about teaching from the relative abstractness and differing purposes of observation or reflection. To paraphrase Mace (1977), the proper focus of study is not what is inside the teacher’s head, but what the teacher’s head is inside of. This shift perhaps represents a continuation of already highly situated and context-sensitive outlook of approaches to noticing (Kaiser et al. 2017, Jazby et al. 2022).

Related to this shift is the proposed mechanism for changes to noticing; the education of attention (and intention) in order to attune the teacher to relevant affordances in their teaching environment. This mechanism is likely already being leveraged by noticing-based approaches to teacher development. While approaches like van Es and Sherin (2010) and Santagata et al. (2018, 2021) video-based methods focus on engendering cognitive change, they may be effective precisely because they prompt perceptual change through the implicit and explicit guidance of attention, the exploration of different affordances (perhaps involving imagination), and the opportunity for subsequent practice in the teaching environment. Approaches like Kazemi et al. (2016) and Lampert et al. (2013) ‘rehearsals’ may also be leveraging the same mechanism in a different way; learner teachers can explore the space of possible affordances with guidance from their mentor in the rehearsal stage and then actively attempt to reveal those affordances in real practice. Knowing precisely what mechanism is at work here can help us refine current approaches to teacher development as well as adapt current approaches to focus more on perceptual learning. For instance, I have proposed how video-based methods and coteaching methods may be adapted with ‘guided attention’ to focus specifically on engendering perceptual learning (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2024).

Conclusion

In the ecological-enactive perspective teacher noticing can be defined simply as the perception of affordances. Conceptualising noticing in this way explains why noticing is so fundamentally situated (both in physical and sociocultural terms) and action-oriented, its very intuitive and anticipatory nature, and why expert teachers often have trouble explaining their noticing. In addition, this perspective offers a mechanism for the development of noticing: the education of attention and intention in order to attune a teacher to new/different affordances. In this sense, an ecological-enactive offers an innovative theoretical framework for teachers’ professional competencies and expertise – something Kaiser et al. (2017) have called for – and takes us substantially closer to the ‘comprehensive model’ of noticing called for by Sherin and Star (2011).

The ecological-enactive approach, like the ecological psychology approaches of Jazby (2021) and Scheiner (2020), shifts the emphasis of noticing from what is going on in a teacher’s head (a cognitivist perspective), to a teacher’s perception-action in their actual teaching environment. This has repercussions for what the proper focus of both the study of and the development of noticing should be yet nonetheless reflects the core idea of noticing; that what teachers do is a product of how they attend and make functional sense of teaching situations.

There are some clear directions for building on the conceptualisation I have offered here. For one, finding a way of accessing or measuring what affordances teachers actually perceive may begin to tell us the sorts of affordance landscapes teachers encounter. The stress on the education of attention as the means of developing noticing contains a hypothesis; that teaching practice can be significantly developed by guiding attention alone. Testing this hypothesis may lend important support to the hypothesis and potentially inform new strategies for developing teacher noticing. There are also more theoretical avenues to explore. For instance, what is meant by imagination in actual teaching practice and what role might be played by more deliberative thinking in teachers’ imaginative activities.

In addition, the full scope of an affordance-based perspective has only been hinted at here and there are many more areas for exploration. For instance, the perception of affordances is ‘saturated by emotionality and affective involvement’ (Jensen and Pedersen 2016, p. 79). Exploring this may give us greater insight into what is perhaps an underexplored aspect of noticing; how affect and emotion shape a teacher’s perception and action. Indeed, the notion that the perception of affordances is a pervasive feature of life means that almost every aspect of the teaching experience can be explored from an ecological-enactive perspective. Much development is still needed but conceptualising teacher noticing as the perception of affordances provides a powerful model for understanding what noticing is, how it is experienced, and crucially, how it can be developed in order to help teachers better respond to the often-challenging teaching environments in they find themselves.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).