Magdalene Lampert

Learning Teaching in, from, and for Practice: What Do We Mean?

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.

Keeping It Complex: Using Rehearsals to Support Novice Teacher Learning of Ambitious Teaching

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.

Using Designed Instructional Activities to Enable Novices to Manage Ambitious Mathematics Teaching

If teacher education is to prepare novices to engage successfully in the complex work of ambitious instruction, it must somehow prepare them to teach within the continuity of the challenging moment-by-moment interactions with students and content over time. With Leinhardt, we would argue that teaching novices to do routines that structure teacher–student–content relationships over time to accomplish ambitious goals could both maintain and reduce the complexity of what they need to learn to do to carry out this work successfully. These routines would embody the regular “participation structures” that specify what teachers and students do with one another and with the mathematical content. But teaching routines are not practiced by ambitious teachers in a vacuum and they cannot be learned by novices in a vacuum. In Lampert’s classroom, the use of exchange routines occurred inside of instructional activities with particular mathematical learning goals like successive approximation of the quotient in a long division problem, charting and graphing functions, and drawing arrays to represent multi-digit multiplications. To imagine how instructional activities using exchange routines could be designed as tools for mathematics teacher education, we have drawn on two models from outside of mathematics education. One is a teacher education program for language teachers in Rome and the other is a program that prepares elementary school teachers at the University of Chicago. Both programs use instructional activities built around routines as the focus of a practice-oriented approach to teacher preparation.

Expert Knowledge and Expert Thinking in Teaching: A Response to Floden and Klinzing

In their article “What Can Research on Teacher Thinking Contribute to Teacher Preparation? A Second Opinion” (Educational Researcher, June/July, 1990), Floden and Klinzing contend that teacher education would be improved if it were informed by research on practicing teacherss expertise. We do not disagree. However, other questions must be answered if such reforms are to be effective: What is expertise in teaching? How is expertise communicated? Who are the experts? This article attempts to address these questions and further the discussion of expert thinking in teaching.

What can research on teacher education tell us about improving quality in mathematics education

Abstract In order to speculate about how teacher education can function to improve mathematics education, we need to specify what sort of mathematics learning we want schools to produce, what sort of teaching causes that learning, and how teachers might be educated to do that sort of teaching. Research on teaching and teacher education is reviewed here which helps to clarify these relationships, including work in the teacher effects tradition; studies of organizational change, undergraduate programs, and institutional socialization; and analyses of knowledge and skill development and use with experienced teachers.

Chapter 2: Alternative Perspectives on Knowing Mathematics in Elementary Schools

From all sides are coming calls for changes in the amount and quality of mathematics instruction in American schools (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1980; National Research Council, 1989). Critics of current practice posit that the mathematical achievement and understanding of U.S. students lag behind that of their peers in other industrialized countries (McKnight et al., 1987; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; National Science Board Commission on Pre-College Education in Mathematics Science and Technology, 1983). Mathematics educators and researchers argue that current mathematics instruction in elementary and secondary schools focuses too much on efficient computation and not enough on mathematical understanding, problem solving, and reasoning. Leaders in business and industry are claiming that public education must change to teach to the new kinds of mathematical skills and problem-solving abilities that will be important for the worker of the future (see, e.g., Bernstein, 1988). Accompanying these criticisms of current practice are calls for reform, for making lasting and fundamental

Improving Teaching and Teachers: A "Generative Dance"?

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.

Appreciating the Complexity of Teaching and Learning in School: A Commentary on Cobb; Forman and Ansell; McClain; Saxe; Schliemann; and Sfard

What is most striking about these articles is their similarity rather than their differences. All of the authors recognize that in school, students learn by interacting with cultural artifacts, teachers, and peers. All aim to conceptualize the mechanisms whereby such interactions might support the acquisition of new knowledge and skill. Each article brings a different lens to the classroom learning environment, but every article purports to hold all of these kinds of interactions in view at once rather than screening out some and focusing on others. In all learning encounters, students act in a relationship with that which is to be learned; this action takes the form of what Sfard called “school discourse.” Sfard defines the purpose of activity in this relationship as improving communication with self and others in such a way as to be able to use cultural artifacts to solve problems. I have taken to calling this kind of activity “studying.”1 In relation to the kind of learning practices that occurred in the stats project lessons, I would use the term studying to include activities like inquiring, discussing, thinking, reading carefully, and examining closely. Teaching then would be defined as the practice of structuring the activities of studying in relation to particular content and particuTHE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 11(2&3), 365–368 Copyright

Learning about Teaching about Learning: Teacher Educators Challenge Conventional Ideologies@@@Teaching, Multimedia, and Mathematics: Investigations of Real Practice

Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Ball draw on their experience as teachers, teacher educators and researchers on teaching in the development of teacher education. In this text, they engage prospective teachers in investigating primary records of practice, and making sense of teaching and learning.