Using Representations to See and Analyze Practice

“Representations” (Grossman et al., 2009; Grossman, Hammerness & McDonald, 2009) are artifacts and illustrations of instruction. They include video, transcripts, student work, and even teacher educator modeling of teaching practice. Depending on how teacher educators use them, representations can serve many purposes in the work teacher educators, mentor teachers, and field instructors do with novice teachers. Teacher educators can use pedagogies of representation to expose novices to diverse illustrations of teaching across many different contexts. Among other things, representations can be helpful for inspiring novices to notice specific aspects of teaching practice, for improving novices’ content knowledge for teaching, for teaching novices to notice and identify patterns of student thinking, or for leading novices to identify moments in instruction where inequities could be disrupted and justice advanced.

For more information, see:

• Grossman, P., Compton, C., Igra, D., Ronfeldt, M., Shahan, E., & Williamson, P. (2009). Teaching practice: A cross-professional perspective. Teachers College Record, 111(9), 2055-2100.

• Grossman, P., Hammerness, K., & McDonald, M. (2009). Redefining teaching, re‐imagining teacher education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 15(2), 273-289.

Teacher educators frequently use representations that help novices see and analyze practice at two different phases of the learning cycle (see Lampert et al., 2013; McDonald, Kazemi and Kavanagh, 2013): “introduce” and “analyze.”

Adapted from:
McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanagh, 2013; Lampert et al., 2013;
Teacher Education by Design

Pedagogies of representation are often used during the “introduce” phase as a way of exposing novice teachers to diverse examples of teaching practice or teaching contexts. Such representations might include video, transcripts or classroom discourse, student work, and other artifacts of teaching and learning in which critical aspects of instructional practice or important content knowledge for teaching are apparent. Teacher educators might also intentionally use representations that are more or less “zoomed in” during this phase of the learning cycle, as doing so can prompt novices to study one aspect of practice very closely while also encouraging them to learn about how that practice functions more broadly inside different instructional settings.

In the “analyze” phase, teacher educators might also use representations of novice teachers’ own instructional practice. Videos, transcripts, and other artifacts from novices’ teaching can become individual or shared texts during teacher education coursework for seeing and analyzing teaching.

For more information, see:

• Lampert, M., Franke, M. L., Kazemi, E., Ghousseini, H., Turrou, A. C., Beasley, H., Cunard, A., & Crowe, K. (2013). Keeping it complex using rehearsals to support novice teacher learning of ambitious teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(3), 226-243.

• McDonald, M., Kazemi, E., & Kavanagh, S. S. (2013). Core practices and pedagogies of teacher education: A call for a common language and collective activity. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(5), 378-386.