Kevin Karplus
31 May 1994, revised 24 December 1994
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This essay was prompted by an exercise suggested by the American Association for Higher Education, which asked for a ``telling episode or some incident of classroom practice that reveals something distinctive'' and provided three possible strategies to document the episode or incident: videotape, classroom visit, or case report.
Unfortunately, ``telling episodes'' do not happen on demand and to schedule, so neither of the first two strategies seems appropriate, though either is less work than writing a case report. If the goal of the exercise had been to observe a typical class, rather than a ``telling episode'', I would probably have chosen to use videotape.