Teaching, Multimedia, and Mathematics

Book excerpt: New from the Practitioner Inquiry Series, this volume covers every aspect of how a teacher learns to be a teacher. The authors, two veteran teacher researchers, develop an approach to teaching and teacher education that is rooted in the study of practice. Lampert and Ball use video, audio, and text tools to capture information about what occurred in their two mathematics education classrooms during one school year.The text features: close examination of the daily interplay between teacher, student, and subject content; videos of lessons, children's work, and teachers' daily plans that can be used as the curriculum for teacher education in a technology-supported environment; the authors' extensive experience in engaging prospective teachers in the "messy work" of making sense of teaching and learning. This groundbreaking volume is also distinctive for situating teacher learning about subject matter within teacher learning about other elements of practice, such as equity, assessment, and collaborative work. The book concludes with an essay by historian and policy analyst David Cohen, where he analyzes this work and the efforts to bring experience with "real" teaching into teacher preparation.