The promise of multimedia representations of teaching lies both in the potential to highlight aspects of teaching often unseen or misunderstood and the possibility for fostering broader public discussions of what productive and powerful teaching for diverse students might look like.  In part, that promise grows out of the fact that many aspects of teaching can be represented in digital form which allows viewers to pursue sustained and collaborative explorations of teaching from many perspectives over time. Yet we have a long way to go to figure out what the implications are for representing teaching using different kinds of artifacts – through videos of teaching alone, combinations of videos, artifacts, and reflections, etc. – or in different forms or “genres” – cases, stories, dilemmas, reports etc..  But whatever form the representations take, part of the promise also lies in the possibility of producing multiple representations of practice that can help to break down broad and simplistic generalizations about teaching and foster an understanding of what teaching in different contexts, in different subjects, with different students may entail. 

Thus, in addition to facilitating the in-depth examination of representations of teaching in one classroom, the explosion of digital media also means that we can also develop networks of representations that enable people to look across several different examples of teaching in their own communities or linked to their concerns and interests.  Rather than a repository for “best practices” to be implemented across contexts, constantly growing and shifting networks of representations can be used to study the teaching and learning in going on in different contexts and to explore how it can be improved.  One can imagine for example, teacher educators both engaging their students in examinations of exemplary practice from around the country (or around the world) at the same time that those novice teachers collaboratively explore representations of teaching in the communities where they are most likely to end up working; novice teachers could also examine representations of practice at different points in a teacher’s career to develop their understanding of the steps they may have to take in developing their own practice.  Similarly, in addition to getting information from websites disseminating test score data, one can imagine parents having opportunities to see and explore rich examples of the kinds of teaching going on in their own schools as well as other schools in their community or around the country. 

One central problem for the development and use of representations of teaching lies in the challenge of portraying teaching as it often occurs – unpredictable, sometimes inspiring, sometimes dull, working for some but not for others – while protecting and respecting the rights and values of those involved.  This challenge is exacerbated by the many different values and assumptions about what “good teaching” should look like as well as by the  barrage of representations and other influences that equate good teaching with entertaining teaching.  But in my nightmares, MRT’s are simply used within the constraints and limitations of current approaches to teacher education and professional development. Of course, success of MRT’s might be measured by the number of people who use them and the extent to which their use can be brought “to scale.”  At the same time, user tests and efforts to adapt MRT’s for that purpose – and to meet the immediate needs and concerns of teachers, teacher educators, administrators, and policymakers – may also limit the power of MRT’s to spur improvements and innovations in the current system. 

In work with colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Quest Project, and now at the National Center for Restructuring Education Schools and Teaching (NCREST), I have developed a variety of multimedia websites that document teaching in a variety of contexts, grade levels and subject areas.  A digital exhibition of this work, along with an extended discussion in the exhibition “catalog” and in commentaries from invited reviewers can be seen through Teachers College Record where it was published ( http://www.tcrecord.org/makingteachingpublic/ ).  In terms of new directions for this work, while these “websites of practice” explore different ways of representing teaching, for the most part, the unit of analysis remains one class or one unit in the work of one teacher, and many questions remain about how to connect these separate sites into networks of practice.  In order to address some of these issues, in collaboration with Pam Grossman, I am developing a digital exhibition that focuses on the use of group discussion in the work of both veteran and novice teachers in several High School English classrooms as well as in a teacher education course.  I am also exploring the development of exhibitions that document teaching across classrooms in a particularly successful school and among teachers identified as “effective” through “value-added” measures or through the production of exemplary student work.  Ultimately, I believe that an exhibition exploring the work, conditions, and contexts of powerful teaching from a number of countries in the developing world would also prove extremely useful in challenging common conceptions of what good teaching looks like and what it takes to carry it out.