Teacher attention to number choice in problem posing

•Teachers attended to number choice as an element of their problem posing practices.•Teachers had a range of ways for how they attended to number choice.•A developmental progression for number choice moves from no attention, to beginning attention, to purposeful attention.

This study examined how teachers used number choice in contextualized word problems as a pedagogical approach for meeting instructional goals. By collecting and analyzing the contextualized word problems posed by 20 teachers along with their rationales, I identified several means by which teachers used number choice. Additionally, results indicate and characterize a progression for using number choice from no attention to purposeful attention. Implications for decomposing the teaching practice of posing problems to children are discussed.