Lessons with Detailed Description and Commentary

This resource guide contains detailed descriptions and commentary for 14 of the 28 lessons, comprised of:

• Lesson outline
• Mathematical and pedagogical comments
• Technical details
• Further discussion

Lessons with detailed descriptions and commentaries

Lesson outline

This section provides context for clips from the lesson and an overview of the video. It combines information provided in separate documents on the CDs and gives it a more mathematical formulation. It also includes relevant information from the commentaries (e.g., how this lesson compares with the research lessons). Teacher educators can use these lesson outlines as handouts to provide context for a video clip from the lesson. Lesson outlines include:

• the mathematical topic of the lesson and the lesson’s location in the course unit
• the mathematical topic of each segment of the lesson
• the kind of instructional strategy used in each lesson segment (whole-class discussion, small groups, pairs, etc.).

Mathematical and pedagogical comments

This section includes TIMSS work session team members’ discussion of the specific clips they identified as well as recommendations for their use for certain lessons. Some comments call attention to differences in the presentation of the mathematics across countries.

Technical details

This section begins with a file name for each lesson. This information is provided for Mac users who want to expand the video to full screen (see Technical Note).

For some lessons the lesson graph on the CD may require elaboration or clarification. There may also be mistakes or translation errors in the lesson transcript. (Because team members detected translation errors in the Czech lessons, a Czech undergraduate majoring in mathematics at DePaul University retranslated these. The translations are available in the Lessons by Country document. Bold text indicates significant mathematical differences in translation from the original provided on the CD.)

Further discussion

This section contains elaboration of the mathematical or pedagogical topics summarized in the lesson outline. It also identifies connections of the lesson with previous and future mathematics learning and includes recommendations for making the mathematics more understandable to both teachers and students. Some descriptions feature suggestions on how to use the lesson as a teaching tool.