Ebook: Lesson Play in Mathematics Education:: A Tool for Research and Professional Development

Lesson play is a novel construct in research and teachers’ professional development in mathematics education. Lesson play refers to a lesson or part of a lesson presented in dialogue form—inspired in part by Lakatos’s evocative Proofs and Refutations—featuring imagined interactions between a teacher and her/his students. We have been using and refining our use of this tool for a number of years and using it in a variety of situations involving mathematics thinking and learning. The goal of this proposed book is to offer a comprehensive survey of the affordances of the tool, the results of our studies—particularly in the area of pre-service teacher education, and the reasons that the tool offers such productive possibilities for both researchers and teacher educators.

The book presents Lesson Play, a novel construct in mathematics education to be used by researchers and teacher educators. Inspired in part by the style of Lakatos’s evocative Proofs and Refutations, Lesson Play features imagined interactions between a teacher and her/his students, presented in the form of a script for dialogue in the classroom. This book offers the first comprehensive survey of the affordances of the Lesson Play tool, particularly in the areas of pre-service teacher education and teacher professional development. It exemplifies an approach to teacher education that seeks to coordinate mathematical and pedagogical dimensions of teaching as they emerge in real classroom settings by focusing on aspects of practice such as teaching moves and classroom discourse.