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.