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We analyze a particular pedagogy for learning to interact productively with students and subject matter, which we call “rehearsal.” Our goal is to specify a way in which teacher educators (TEs) and novice teachers (NTs) can interact around teaching that is both embedded in practice and amenable to analysis. We address two main research questions: (a) What do TEs and NTs do together during the kind of rehearsals we have developed to prepare novices for the complex, interactive work of teaching? and (b) Where, in what they do, are there opportunities for NTs to learn to enact the principles, practices, and knowledge entailed in ambitious teaching? We detail what happens in rehearsals using quantitative and qualitative methods. We begin with the results of our quantitative analyses to characterize how typical rehearsals were structured and what was worked on. We then show how NTs and TEs worked together to enable novices to study principled practice through qualitative analyses of a particularly salient aspect of ambitious teaching, namely, eliciting and responding to students' performance. (Contains 3 tables, 2 figures, and 5 notes.)

Working on teaching as a collective practice--understanding it, specifying it, and improving it--is crucially important and too often ignored. But setting up a choice between improving teaching and improving teachers is problematic for several reasons. To begin with, it seems that the very methods Hiebert and Morris outline for improving teaching necessarily imply the simultaneous improvement of teachers. Improvement as they describe it suggests a "generative dance" between the organizational knowledge embedded in artifacts and the individuals who learn how to use and continuously improve those artifacts. Looking at teaching through the lens of practice theory has two important consequences: it challenges the dichotomy between individual and collective learning, and it focuses attention on the systematization of resources in the organizational setting as an important component of competence building. (Contains 1 note.)

Background/Context: "Ambitious teaching" is teaching that aims to teach all kinds of students to not only to know academic subjects, but also to be able to use what they know in working on authentic problems in academic domains. Studies of individual teachers have identified the challenges of this work. Resources are often provided at the school level with the purpose of making this kind of teaching more common. But as Cohen, Raudenbusch, and Ball (2003) point out, it is not making resources available to a school that matters in improving instruction, but getting those resources to be used in instructional interactions where teachers and students work together to get academic content learned. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of the case study was to understand how the common use of resources across a school functions to enable those resources to make their way into the instructional stream. First, the use of shared social, intellectual, and material resources was investigated in consistently ambitious teaching across diverse classes and teachers in the school. Using a conceptual frame from social practice theory, we then examined how resources in use shaped teachers' common interpretations of teaching problems and common assumptions about appropriate solutions. Research Design: Qualitative case study based on extensive observation and interviews. Conclusions/Recommendations: As a field, we need to provide images and narratives for ambitious teaching that is scaffolded in such a way that one can be a mere mortal and yet capably meet its routine demands. In this paper we have tried to provide one such image. We can offer several strong hypotheses based on this casework; the first is that ambitious teaching is more manageable when it is undertaken collectively, when it is supported by common materials, and has an intellectual underpinning that is useful and routinely used. Ambitious teaching is made more sustainable when a multiplicity of resources are drawn upon in concert, not installed one at a time and delivered to individual practitioners. We have tried to illustrate the strong role that an organization can play in the development of widespread ambitious teaching. In this image the organization supports ambitious teaching in such a way that most teachers can see, enact, and routinely articulate, this approach.

To understand how teacher education might build the knowledge it needs, the editors of this issue investigate how organizations outside of education create and maintain "self-improving" systems that enable them to learn how to get better at what they do. To learn about knowledge building in teacher education, the research reported here also looks outside--outside of mathematics teacher education and outside the structure of professional preparation for teaching as it occurs in universities and colleges. This article explores features of a system of collective knowledge building in and for teaching and teacher education that are in place in an international, school-based program for teachers of Italian as a foreign language. We use our study of this unusual teacher education program to investigate how a carefully chosen set of instructional activities, built out of the essential social and intellectual routines of ambitious teaching, can make it possible for novices to teach ambitiously and for teacher educators to build knowledge. (Contains 2 figures and 4 notes.)

Considers the potential for teacher research to change ideas about who is responsible for producing knowledge, the benefits and dangers of inserting the self into the social sciences, and the challenges of presenting problems of practice from within practice. (Author/SK)

This paper presents a pedagogy of teacher education that uses hypermedia technology to represent the complexities of actual work in classrooms and make multiple images of innovative teaching and learning available for study. A course in which hypermedia tools are used to involve prospective teachers in inquiry learning about mathematics teaching is described. (Author/JDD)

Bringing the practice of knowing mathematics in school closer to knowing mathematics within the discipline was studied with 18 fifth graders. Student activities in asserting and examining hypotheses were contrasted with conventional school mathematics activities. (SLD)

In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when the learning of teaching is supposed to happen. In this article, four different conceptions of practice are investigated, and their implications for how learning teaching might be organized are explored. Rather than a comprehensive review of the literature, what is presented here is a set of ideas that draw on both past and present efforts at reform. The purpose of this essay is to provoke clarification of what we mean when we talk about practice in relation to learning teaching. The author draws on her own research on the work of teaching from the perspective of practice to represent the nature of the work and to speculate from various perspectives on how that work might be learned. Keywords teaching, practice, teacher education, professional development, In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when learning the work of teaching is supposed to happen. Listening [...]

In two case studies, Lampert views the teacher as dilemma manager-- a broker of contradictory interests. Other images of teachers--as choosing among dichotomous alternative views, fulfilling others' expectations, as technical production managers and implementers of theories on learning--are contrasted with the perspective of teaching as the acceptance of continuous conflict with which teachers can learn to cope. (SK)

How multiplication is usually taught in school and how it could be taught are discussed. Development of understanding is illustrated through children's words and work. (MNS)

Research on the complexity of teaching, what teachers know, and methods of studying teachers' thought processes are discussed. Implications of research on teacher thinking lead to the view that research enables teachers to understand practice rather than to dictate it. (MT)

A review of teaching and teacher education research, including work on teacher effects, organizational change, undergraduate programs, and institutional socialization, explores how teacher education programs can promote those teaching styles which effect the best type of mathematics learning. (Author/CB)

Describes a teaching experiment examining the possibility of the redefinition of a multiplication problem from a problem of remembering, to a problem of figuring out why arithmetic rules make sense. (YP)

In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when the learning of teaching is supposed to happen. In this article, four different conceptions of practice are investigated, and their implications for how learning teaching might be organized are explored. Rather than a comprehensive review of the literature, what is presented here is a set of ideas that draw on both past and present efforts at reform. The purpose of this essay is to provoke clarification of what we mean when we talk about practice in relation to learning teaching. The author draws on her own research on the work of teaching from the perspective of practice to represent the nature of the work and to speculate from various perspectives on how that work might be learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]