1 Depict: A Tool to Represent Classroom Scenarios 1 Patricio Herbst 2 and Vu Minh Chieu 3 University of Michigan Depict is a web-based software tool for representing classroom interaction. Depict 1 is currently available in Beta version integrated in the LessonSketch environment (www.lessonsketch.org). This document discusses the theoretical and practical aspects of the design of Depict and is to be complemented with a technical description. The need for Depict is predicated on two fundamental ideas drawn from research on teaching and teacher education: (1) That professional knowledge of teachers is encoded and embodied in narratives of practice and (2) That the development of capacity to teach requires knowledge of practice as well as the practice of that knowledge (cf. Carter, 1993; Lampert, 2010). Depict emerged as an idea and development project from project ThEMaT, which gave to it the in-house name, ThEMaT’s Composer, with which Depict was referred in earlier presentations and draft versions of this document. 4 Project ThEMaT created cartoon based, animated scenarios of classroom interaction in mathematics and used those to confront teachers with problems of practice. 5 The internal work of the project, collectively developing the scripts for those stories, already suggested the need of a storyboarding tool that could facilitate the writer’s use of the several modes of communication present in classroom interaction (not only voice but also written inscriptions, printed text, gestures, facial expression, body position and location, and body movement). But the data collected by the ThEMaT project, which showed how practitioners responded to animated scenarios by narrating alternative scenarios provided an even stronger suggestion: A composing tool could assist practitioners in representing those alternative scenarios. While simpler activities such as writing a dialogue could be used to precipitate and collect practitioners’ stories, we hypothesized that a graphics-based lesson- depicting tool could provide some added value. To be specific, we made the following two hypotheses: (1) Teachers’ thinking about the tactical demands of classroom interaction could be stimulated with the assistance of a tool for modeling lessons as moment- to-moment conversations, and (2) Teachers’ thinking about the multivocality (intellectual diversity) and multimodality of classroom communication could be stimulated with the assistance of a tool that represented the many participants of classroom work using cartoon characters where humans were modeled in such a way as to enable them to communicate through some facial expressions and gestures as well as to represent some degree of individual difference. The present document has three components. The first component describes briefly the character development project that we have done. The second component describes the software development that we have done and anticipates how this will enable ongoing work. The third 1 Revised and updated version of internal document titled “ThEMaT’s Composer: Background, current state, and foreseeable goals” and dated November 2009. 2 Contact: pgherbst@umich.edu 3 Feedback from Chialing Chen is acknowledged. 4 ThEMaT: Thought Experiments in Mathematics Teaching. Funded by the National Science Foundation, ESI- 0353285, PI Patricio Herbst, co-PI Daniel Chazan. 5 See those animated scenarios among the collection of lessons in LessonSketch, www.lessonsketch.org.