Sharing instructional knowledge via lesson analysis.

In this article we introduce a type of teaching scholarship called Lesson Analysis (LA) that helps build instructional knowledge, and an associated genre of writing called Lesson Analysis Manuscript (LAM) that shares this instructional knowledge. We briefly describe the problem LA is intended to solve, as well as key features of a LAM. In LA, instructors develop lessons that overcome specific instructional challenges. LAMs are lesson-specific manuscripts that help others understand details of the lesson that addressed the instructional challenge, and include such information as the instructional context, the rationale behind the instructional decisions, typical student thinking, and guidance on carrying out discussions and implementing tasks. We have illustrated this genre by including an entire example LAM as supplemental material located online. The example LAM focuses on helping students understand the connection between dot products and the connection of dot products to measures of similarity between vectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]