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In order to improve teaching, it is important to understand why teaching looks the way that it now does and how its general form can be explained. One way to address this question is at the classroom level. This approach has been found in the ethnographic work of anthropologists and has been skillfully applied in the recent work of such researchers as Robin Alexander and Kathryn Anderson-Levitt. Building on ethnographic research by using the 1999 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) video archives, the authors consider two possible explanations for the general patterns that have developed in school teaching. One, being the presence of some universal elements in most schools today that include the physical environment, the social dynamics of classrooms, and the content to be learned; and second, the notion that countries have shaped teaching by evolving classroom methods that are aligned with their national cultural beliefs, expectations, and values. In this article, they report on the duration and sequencing of three instructional features among the lessons from the TIMSS 1999 Video Study; giving specific focus on the purpose, classroom interaction, and content activity of lessons. The findings from the analyses of patterns of teaching with respect to degree of convergence (global and then national, across all three dimensions and then within each dimension), convergence across and within countries (including "lesson signatures" for each country), and summary contrasts (with respect to purpose, classroom interaction, and content activity) are also presented. (Contains 42 notes.)

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1999 Video Study examined eighth-grade mathematics teaching in the United States and six higher-achieving countries. A range of teaching systems were found across higher-achieving countries that balanced attention to challenging content, procedural skill, and conceptual understanding in different ways. The United States displayed a unique system of teaching, not because of any particular feature but because of a constellation of features that reinforced attention to lower-level mathematics skills. The authors argue that these results are relevant for policy (mathematics) debates in the United States because they provide a current account of what actually is happening inside U.S. classrooms and because they demonstrate that current debates often pose overly simple choices. The authors suggest ways to learn from examining teaching systems that are not alien to U.S. teachers but that balance a skill emphasis with attention to challenging mathematics and conceptual development. (Contains 1 table, 9 figures, and 6 notes.)