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TEACHING PROBLEMS AND THE PROBLEMS OF TEACHING by Magdalene Lampert. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. 496pp. $35.00.
A cacophony continues about standards and accountability in states and districts, but the conversation about teaching practice continues to be muffled. Magdalene Lampert's Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching brings a welcome perspective to the discourse. As an elementary school mathematics teacher and an educational researcher, she is uniquely positioned to describe her everyday work in the "teaching of problems" and the "problems of teaching" that she encounters in this work. Lampert provides a valuable study of the teaching practice of using complex mathematical problems to generate conceptual understanding in her fifth-grade mathematics class. The book benefits from Lampert's professional hybridization; she brings obvious skill as both a teacher and researcher to this study. Her book offers a close examination of one teacher, herself, with one group of students studying one subject, math, over the course of one academic year, providing an understanding of the implications of teaching with problems.
Lampert observes that coordinating the teacher's actions with the students' actions is the "essence of [teaching] practice" (p. 7). However, she points out that the implications of teaching with problems for this "coordination" are rarely documented. Lampert undertakes this documentation beautifully, demonstrating how incredibly complicated teaching is through vivid, detailed accounts of lessons, complete with transcripts of teacher-student interactions, figures used during the lessons, a replica of the blackboard during various stages of the lesson, and excerpts from her own teaching journal. Those familiar with Lampert's writing have come to expect her to take on such questions as, "How do teachers manage to teach?" In her introduction, Lampert explains that she wrote the book to "inform debates about [reform] issues with a more adequate understanding of the problems in practice that teachers need to manage in order to teach productively" (p. 8). Her book provides one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful descriptions of teachers' work in the field.
Lampert begins with the question, "Understanding Teaching: Why Is It So Hard?" (p. 1), and sets out to understand the problems that an individual teacher must address and to document the ways a...