Section I: Introductions.

Chapter 1: Theorizing Instructional Practice. Timothy Koschmann.
Chapter 2: Invention in the Classroom: Structuring Natural Variability as Distribution. Rich Lehrer and Leona Schauble.
Appendix A: Transcription conventions
Appendix B: Classroom excerpts

Section II: The Situated Action Perspective.

Chapter 3: A Situative Perspective on Cognition and Learning in Interaction. James Greeno.
Chapter 4: A Commentary on Incommensurate Programs. Doug Macbeth.
Chapter 5: Representational Competence: A Commentary. Allan Collins.
Chapter 6: The Interaction of Content and Control in Group Problem Solving and Learning. Eric Bredo.
Chapter 7: Working Both Sides. Kay McClain.
Responses to the Commentaries by Jim Greeno.

Section III: A Dialogic Theory of Learning.

Chapter 8: Saying More Than You Know in Instructional Settings. Jim Wertsch and Sibel Kazak.
Chapter 9: Schooling: Domestication or Ontological Construction? Martin Packer.
Chapter 10: Developing Fluency versus Conceptual Change. Bruce Sherin.
Chapter 11: From Dialectic to Dialogic. Rupert Wegerif.
Chapter 12: Vygotsky and Teacher Education in the Knowledge Age. Sharon Derry.
Responses to the Commentaries by Jim Wertsch and Sibel Kazak.

Section IV: Transactional Inquiry.

Chapter 13: A Transactional Perspective on the Practice-Based Science of Teaching and Learning. William Clancey.
Chapter 14: On Plants and Textual Representations of Plants: Learning to Reason in Institutional Categories. Roger Säljö.
Chapter 15: Contributions of the Transactional Perspective to Instructional Design and the Analysis of Learning in Social Context. Paul Cobb.
Chapter 16: Transacting with Clancey's "Transactional Perspective on the Practice-Based Science of Teaching and Learning." Jim Garrison.
Chapter 17: Making Sense of Practice in Mathematics: Models, Theories and Disciplines. Jere Confrey.
Responses to the Commentaries by Bill Clancey.

Section V: Synthesis.

Chapter 18: Observations on the Observations. Rich Lehrer and Leona Schauble.
Chapter 19: Cultural Forms, Agency, and the Discovery of Invention in Classroom Research on Learning and Teaching. Rogers Hall.
Chapter 20: Reflections on Practice, Teaching/Learning, Video, and Theorizing. Frederick Erickson.
Chapter 21: Does "Learning" Exist? Ray McDermott.

This is a book about an attempt to change the way math was taught in a particular classroom. Its title plays on our everyday usage of the terms theory and practice. In education, these terms are conventionally treated oppositionally-we have theories about what we should do and we have what teachers actually do do. In this way, theory stands prior, logically and chronologically, to practice; practice inevitably becoming theory's imperfect realization. We seek in this volume, however, to develop a different stance with regard to the relationship between the two. Taking the details of instructional practice as our principle object of study, we explore what role theories of learning might play in illuminating such practices. The book is about actual practices by which teaching is done and how contemporary theories of learning might help us understand those practices. It seeks to provide a foundation for future practice-based inquiry in education, by addressing the methodological question: How do we go about studying instructional practice in a principled way?