To improve classroom teaching in a steady, lasting way, the teaching profession needs a knowledge base that grows and improves. In spite of the continuing efforts of researchers, archived research knowledge has had little effect on the improvement of practice in the average classroom. We explore the possibility of building a useful knowledge base for teaching by beginning with practitioners’ knowledge. We outline key features of this knowledge and identify the requirements for this knowledge to be transformed into a professional knowledge base for teaching. By reviewing educational history, we offer an incomplete explanation for why the United States has no countrywide system that meets these requirements. We conclude by wondering if U.S. researchers and teachers can make different choices in the future to enable a system for building and sustaining a professional knowledge base for teaching.

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Although the policy context that surrounds education changes like a series of hurricanes blowing across the Gulf of Mexico, the substantive nature of what happens in classrooms stays pretty much the same. In fact, this is what we would have predicted if teaching is a cultural activity, and after years of studying teaching here and elsewhere, we are convinced, more than ever, that it is. Our book, The Teaching Gap, which was published in 1999, was primarily a report covering a large research project, the TIMSS 1995 Video Study, which looked at mathematics teaching in three countries: Germany, Japan, and the United States. We followed that publication by embarking on a new study, this time in seven countries-the United States and six high-performing countries. The most important things we have learned since we wrote The Teaching Gap revolve around the fact that, just as teaching is a cultural activity and difficult to change, teacher learning is also a cultural activity and thus subject to many of the same forces that keep traditional teaching practices in place. PUSHING THE RESEARCH FORWARD If you were impressed by the methods of teaching used in Japan (described in The Teaching Gap), you are not alone: Readers, especially those from the United States, find the Japanese pattern of teaching both foreign and intriguing at the same time. And, the more mathematically sophisticated the readers, the more struck they are by the elegance with which Japanese teachers engage their students in doing important mathematical work, work that focuses on core mathematical ideas and their applications. That we concluded Japan's method of teaching Closing the Teaching Gap The hard work of improving teaching in the United States can't succeed without changes in the culture of teacher learning.

The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time. The framework is composed of four skills, rooted in the daily activity of teaching, that when deployed deliberately and systematically, constitute a process of creating and testing hypotheses about cause-effect relationships between teaching and learning during classroom lessons. In spite of the challenges of acquiring these skills, the authors argue that the framework outlines a more realistic and more promising set of beginning teacher competencies than those of traditional programs designed to produce graduates with expert teaching strategies.

To investigate relationships between teaching and learning mathematics, the six second-grade classrooms in one school were observed regularly during the 12 weeks of instruction on place value and multidigit addition and subtraction. Two classrooms implemented an alternative to the more conventional textbook approach. The alternative approach emphasized constructing relationships between place value and computation strategies rather than practicing prescribed procedures. Students were assessed at the beginning and the end of the year on place value understanding, routine computation, and novel computation. Students in the alternative classrooms, compared with their more traditionally taught peers, received fewer problems and spent more time with each problem, were asked more questions requesting them to describe and explain alternative strategies, talked more using longer responses, and showed higher levels of performance or gained more by the end of the year on most types of items. The results suggest that relationships between teaching and learning are a function of the instructional environment; different relationships emerged in the alternative classrooms than those that have been reported for more traditional classrooms.