To solve two enduring problems in education--unacceptably large variation in learning opportunities for students across classrooms and little continuing improvement in the quality of instruction--the authors propose a system that centers on the creation of shared instructional products that guide classroom teaching. By examining systems outside…

In order to improve teaching, it is important to understand why teaching looks the way that it now does and how its general form can be explained. One way to address this question is at the classroom level. This approach has been found in the ethnographic work of anthropologists and has been skillfully applied in the recent work of such…