Learning to Look Beyond the Boundaries of Representation: Using Technology to Examine Teaching (Overview for a Digital Exhibition: Learning From the Practice of Teaching)

Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple components, including establishing norms for participation, assisting students in engaging in careful readings of text ahead of time, and modeling features of academic discourse. In other work, Grossman and her colleagues refer to this as the "decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. If decomposing practice enables novices to "see" and supports them in enacting practice, how can multimedia records of practice illustrate both the fluid performance and the individual parts that contribute to such fluidity without making teaching seem rote or simplistic? This challenge--to make teaching accessible for analysis while still capturing its complexity--serves as the focus of a digital exhibition that brings together four Web sites that represent teaching using group discussions in four different ways and contexts. This article describes the background of this work on the Web sites, the conceptual framework that guides the development of the Web sites and this digital exhibition, and a discussion of the exhibition and the implications for the development and exchange of these kinds of multimedia representations of teaching, and their use in teacher education, in the future. (Contains 8 figures and 9 notes.)