Canal-U

“Come on guys, use your sense!” Illuminating the ‘incarnate’ work of teaching - Koshmann

Twelve years ago, Lehrer and Schauble rolled out a newly-designed math and science curriculum in a particular 5th grade
classroom (Lehrer & Schauble, 2004, 2011). In this talk, I will examine a brief fragment of interaction recorded in this classroom.
The participants observed here are trying to work out how to graphically represent a set of data. It is a problem of reconciling the
range of values to be presented with the space available on the sheet of graph paper with which they are working. In the course
of working out this problem, they engage in the concerted generation of a series of number pairs designed to serve as column
labels. This unravels, however, into a complex repair sequence (Schegloff, 2000). My objective is to faithfully describe the
methodic character of this joint activity, to document in detail how understanding was achieved. Within this fleeting episode we
witness the lived-work of teaching. I offer this analysis as an object for reflection and discussion. It will be used to exemplify an
alternative program for studying instructional practice, one based not on assessment, but rather on description.