In the mathematics portion of the TIMSS1 1999 Video Study, an international team of researchers videotaped and analyzed 638 grade 8 mathematics lessons from seven countries (Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States). The goal of this study was to describe typical—not exemplary—teaching in each of these countries, focusing on teaching practices rather than individual teachers. The study then released a 4-CD set (available from both RBS and LessonLab) with four lessons from each country—over 21 hours of lessons—for use in teacher education. The CDs also include extensive support material: information about the lessons, transcripts, textbook pages and worksheets used, and commentaries from the teachers and researchers. (For more information, see TIMSS Public Release Lesson CDs and Background of the 1999 TIMSS Video Study.)
This guide aims to help pre-service and in-service teacher educators help teachers learn from observation, practice, and reflection.These lessons provide snapshots of regular mathematics classrooms from countries that exhibited higher student achievement in mathematics than the United States in 1995. The videos also reveal the level of mathematics students are expected to learn in various countries and how teachers go about helping them learn. However, it is challenging for educators to make use of this vast amount of information; there are considerable variations across countries by pacing, instructional routines, and the number of topics in a lesson, the complexity of teacher questions, and the nature of problems. The purpose of this guide is to make some of the public release lessons from the 1999 study more useful to pre-service and in-service educators in helping teachers deepen their mathematics and pedagogical knowledge.
To this end, in the summer of 2004, Research for Better Schools (RBS) and its many partners convened a group of mathematics educators, mathematicians, and professional developers for a TIMSS work session at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, WI to discuss how best to use the TIMSS public release videos for teacher education. In advance of the work session, each participant analyzed seven of the 28 lessons and reviewed each other’s analyses. At the session, participants worked in teams of four or five (including a mathematician, a post-secondary mathematics educator, a pre-college mathematics educator, and a professional developer) to combine their findings. The conclusions of the TIMSS work session participants have shaped the content and design of this guide, which brings together their insights on information distributed across the entire CD set and offers a road map for how best to make use of it.
This guide aims to help pre-service and in-service teacher educators as well as professional developers engage teachers and help them learn from observation, practice, and reflection. The guide enables users to select relevant lessons and clips from the 28 videos and accompanying resources. While they do not rate lessons according to teaching quality, the materials are designed to assist teachers in building their mathematics knowledge while exploring the pedagogy of teaching mathematics and how the two are intertwined. For general suggestions on how to implement the participants’ recommendations, see Suggestions for Using These Lessons with Teachers.
The TIMSS public release videos offer rich and varied international sources of how teachers struggle with the same issues and concerns. Teacher educators can use this guide to help teachers consider their scripts for teaching: to see different ways to introduce topics, have students share solutions, and pose challenging questions. We hope that these materials, used in conjunction with the videos, will make the hard work of improving classroom teaching a more rewarding experience.
Reference
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (March 2003). Teaching Mathematics in Seven Countries: Results from the TIMSS 1999 Video Study, NCES (2003-013), by A. M.-Y. Chiu, W. Etterbeek, R. Gallimore, H. Garnier, K. Bogard Givvin, P. Gonzales, J. Hiebert, H. Hollingsworth, J. Jacobs, N. Kersting, A. Manaster, C. Manaster, M. Smith, J. Stigler, E. Tseng, and D. Wearne. Washington, DC: Author.