These days, there is more talk about teachers and quality teaching than perhaps there has ever been before. In recent public opinion polls, for example, it’s clear that although the public wants educational reform that’s tied to accountability, they also equate educational improvement with quality teaching and are not willing to lower hiring standards to solve the teacher shortage problem. Along similar lines, even among those who are in favor of teacher education reforms that are quite different from one another, there appears to be consensus that teaching quality is a critical influence on how and what students learn. And, in a number of civil rights cases across the country, legal advocates have been asserting that access to excellent teachers is a birthright of all children. In short, everybody—researchers of all stripes, teacher educators, policy makers, and the public--agrees that teacher quality matters.

For better or for worse, however, there isn’t a clear agreed-upon definition of what quality teaching looks like or what excellent teachers do in today’s classrooms. And of course, teaching has changed dramatically in the last 30, 20 and even in the last 10 years.  Unfortunately,  it sometimes seems that some of those who have the most to say about how teaching and teachers’ preparation should be improved have the least knowledge about actual schools, classrooms, teachers, and students.  Perhaps it’s even  fair to wonder sometimes whether some politicians, critics, and researchers, have even been inside a classroom since their own school days. The challenges today’s teachers face are extremely different from the challenges that faced our mothers’ and fathers’ teachers—the global world in which we live is both smaller and larger than it used to be, the school population in many nations is increasingly diverse, the number of U.S. school students who speak a language other than English at home has skyrocketed, and the opportunities that technology makes possible have increased exponentially.  At the same time, there are persistent achievement, opportunity, and graduation rate disparities among  differing racial, cultural, and language groups; there are unprecedented new accountability mechanisms in place at the local, state and federal levels; and in some places, teacher shortages and/or teacher turnover are severe problems.  So what’s teaching like in this era of globalization, accountability, and rapid change?  What does quality teaching look like today?  How are teachers dealing with the challenges and possibilities that face them?

“Making Teaching Public: A Digital Exhibition” is one answer to this question.  This exhibition offers a multimedia avenue for revealing some of the most important aspects of quality teaching and learning.  It gives viewers a chance to see inside classrooms, a chance to hear teachers’ own words about what they are trying to do with their students and what they are struggling with, and a chance to expand ideas about contemporary roles and responsibilities of teachers. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my tour of this innovative and quite unique exhibition about teaching and learning.  As I sampled videos and students’ work products, I was struck by the fact that a multimedia exhibition like this is particularly good at representing certain aspects of teaching and learning. As I toured different classrooms and sat in on reflective conversations among teachers, I found myself wishing that many of those folks who have strong opinions about how to fix teachers and fix the schools would participate in this kind of virtual tour of quality teaching. 

The connection between teachers’ learning and students’ learning is particularly clear in these snapshots and videos of classrooms.  The juxtaposition of classroom discussions followed by teacher’s reflections, for example, reveals quite vividly that teachers are actors as well as analysts, doers as well as thinkers, and users as well as creators of knowledge.  These exhibitions are especially good at demonstrating that teaching practice is a broad and expansive notion, not a narrow one. Contrary to the notion of “best practice,” which is sometimes very narrowly construed to mean the faithful application of proven teaching techniques to classroom situations, these exhibitions are very good at revealing the professional, intellectual, and relational aspects of teaching.  It is clear that the teachers in these videos know their students and use their knowledge and their relationships with students as scaffolding for building new knowledge, teaching skills, connecting to students’ cultural and linguistic resources, and motivating students to want to come to school and learn.  It is clear that quality teaching means teachers who are also learners who reflect on and inquire into their practice on an ongoing basis.  It also means learners who are teachers--in that teachers learn from their students about how to create curriculum and instruction that is in keeping with varying needs, interests and backgrounds at the same time that it is connected to high expectations for all.

As I finished my virtual tour, I was struck by the fact that a digital exhibition like this—with the myriad possibilities that multimedia affords—is a powerful way to demonstrate the complexity of teaching and learning.  In today’s accountability context, it seems easier and easier for those outside teaching to conclude that the proof of the teaching and learning pudding is in test scores, and test scores alone.  This multimedia exhibit  belies that too easy and too simple assumption. It is clear that the teachers and the students represented in these exhibits are learning, but it also clear that it takes much more than a single indicator to capture that learning.