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Learning to teach effectively is a complex enterprise, and many efforts have been made in order to conceptualise the challenging work of teaching by identifying fundamental teaching practices. Findings reported from structured literature reviews on lesson study have revealed that incorporating a lesson study approach in Initial Teacher Education is challenging. This chapter considers how lesson study might adapt fundamental teaching practices and make use of new tools to enhance lesson study as an approach for improving student-teachers’ teaching practice. The four tools discussed here are lesson study with given activities, practicing talk moves in lesson study, rehearsing research lessons and research lessons with time-outs. The authors argue that these activities are tools which can help student-teachers enhance their learning of the complex work of teaching when involved in lesson study cycles. To illustrate these approaches, we use examples from the teaching of mathematics.

The purpose of this study is to examine what teachers notice in their own enactment of eight high leverage practices as well as the patterns of interactions between the teachers and their peers when participating in video-based lesson study.

Each teacher taught and uploaded video from one lesson to a platform, which allowed video annotation, for their lesson study team. There were nine lesson study teams. This study used a qualitative design to examine the teachers' comments on their own videos as well as the patterns in the comments between peers on lesson study teams.

Teachers noticed both positive instantiations as well as opportunities for growth in their enactment of: using and connecting mathematical representations, posing purposeful questions and supporting students' productive struggle. Analysis displayed a pattern of exchanges where peers coached, validated, empathized and pushed each other beyond their comfort zone as critical peers.

Although not all lesson study teams were made up of school-based teams and the teachers shared short recordings of their teaching, this research contributes to the understanding of how adapting lesson study by using video can help teachers notice their instantiation of teaching practices and peers can support and push one another towards ambitious instruction. Future research could extend this work by investigating the impact of video-based lesson study on teachers in isolated areas who may not have professional learning networks.

Video-based LS may help to overcome barriers to the implementation of lesson study, such as the challenge of scheduling a common release time for lesson observation and the financial burden of funding substitute teachers for release time.

The current realities of COVID-19 creates an opportunity for mathematics educators to reimagine teacher professional development (PD) in ways that push the field forward. In light of this disruption, the authors propose an innovative model of utilizing video-based Lesson Study (LS; Lewis, 2002) with peer coaching to offer PD opportunities with methodological considerations for both mathematics researchers and teacher practitioners. The authors document and analyze a collection of online LSs that were taught by a focal teacher and recorded for the peers in the LS group. Video-based LS PD structure allowed the authors to examine how they can leverage this online model of LS to analyze student thinking and learn about teaching rich tasks in an online environment using eight teaching practices. Through their paper the authors will detail the necessary features of online LS specifically using a video annotation tool like Goreact and how video can be used to enhance the professional learning of the mathematics teaching practices (MTPs; NCTM, 2014) and the noticing of student thinking (Jacobs et al., 2010; Sherin and van Es, 2009; van Es and Sherin, 2002, 2008). In addition, the authors will document the norms that were established in the online LS community that impacted collaboration of LS teams and developed strong peer coaching relationships. The online LS PD design also supports collaboration of teachers from varying contexts, promotes professional growth and demonstrates how educators might leverage peer coaches as social capital within their schools to develop teachers along the professional continuum.

This paper examines how intentional mathematics coaching practices can develop teacher professional noticing of “ambitious teaching practices” (NCTM, 2020) through connected, collaborative coaching cycles.

Narrative analysis is used to examine observations of a mathematics coach and novice teacher to better understand the role of the coach in helping teachers attend to ambitious mathematics teaching (AMT) practices.

The initial findings of this study suggest that intentional use of focused goals, iterative coaching cycles and a gradual release model of coaching can support shifts in noticing of AMT from being led by the coach to being facilitated by the teacher.

This study offers new insights into the functions of mathematics coaching that can foster shifts in teacher noticing and practice toward AMT. It contributes to the literature on what mathematics coaching looks and sounds like in the context of conversations with teachers, as well as the potential influence that structured, intentional, ongoing coaching supports can have on teacher noticing.

This paper aims to examine three distinct aspects of authenticity that pre-service teachers (PSTs) experience when they engage with virtual classroom environments to develop their content-intensive instructional practice – task authenticity, student avatar authenticity and performance authenticity – and their perceptions about the usefulness of the simulated teaching experience to support their learning.

This paper explored these conceptions of authenticity and usefulness within a larger research study whose goal was to develop virtual environment tools to help elementary PSTs learn how to engage in one ambitious teaching practice: facilitating discussions that engage students in argumentation. To examine these aspects of authenticity and usefulness, this paper used a general qualitative deductive analysis approach to examine data from 104 interviews with 26 case study teachers and examined patterns in PSTs’ perceptions within and across interviews and authenticity aspects.

While these PSTs strongly value the utility of these tools to support their learning, findings point to variation in their perceptions of authenticity. Findings showed that most PSTs perceived the tasks as an authentic representation of the work of teaching. However, their perceptions of task authenticity did not always align with their perceptions of avatar or performance authenticity.

This paper argues that these three aspects of authenticity relate to, but expand upon, the broader notions of presence and plausibility noted in the literature on virtual environments and should be taken up more directly in future studies of users’ perceptions of virtual environments both within and outside of educational contexts.

This chapter reframes the notion of teacher quality to encompass teacher qualities and teaching quality in the context of current demands on teacher and student learning. The chapter includes an exemplary case study of a program that depicts the kinds of qualities and practices that would be needed for effective teaching and learning in an era characterized by the need for higher-level skills and knowledge. The final section presents the implications for pre-service and in-service professional development to address the challenges the reconceptualization of teacher quality presents.

The study aims to present a logic map linking the Professional Development School (PDS) Nine Essentials as a PDS theory of action and offer an analysis of dissertations that compare outcomes of learning in PDS and non-PDS contexts.

For this current study, the authors identified 25 of the 210 dissertations from a larger study that used a comparison methodology to provide a window into how learning in PDS and non-PDS settings may differ. In reviewing these comparison studies, the authors identified a set of clustered themes, as well as a variety of comparison constructs and measurements researchers used to determine the impact of PDS.

Five themes emerged including (1) the experience of learning to teach in a PDS setting vs. a non-PDS; (2) the experience of teaching in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (3) teacher candidate quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (4) teacher quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (5) school leader quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; and (6) K-12 student learning in PDS vs. non-PDS.

Limitations of this study include the complications related to comparison, logic-related fallacies and the complexity of capturing simultaneous renewal.

In the 30th year of PDS work, the study utilizes a theory of action comprised of linking the PDS Nine Essentials to situate the comparison dissertation analysis of outcomes in PDS and non-PDS contexts suggesting challenges and possibilities and perhaps a direction for new research questions.

In the United States, policy discussions of teacher education in relationship to teacher quality have tended to focus more closely around debates about the nature of teacher preparation and the need for quality teachers to possess advanced degrees or certification. The field is in need of an array of indicators – a set of powerful, well-researched indicators that can be applied to large public universities as well as small regional private colleges, from university-based programs to “alternative” programs and to more “hybrid” programs. These indicators need to be relevant for teacher certification across a variety of age-ranges and developmental stages. In this chapter, we build on a growing conversation about practice in teacher education and efforts on the part of researchers to identify key features of powerful teacher education. We propose that quality teacher education is designed around a clear and shared vision of good teaching; it is coherent in that it links theory with practice and offers opportunities to learn that are aligned with the vision of good teaching; and it offers opportunities to enact teaching. While these features are supported for the most part by growing consensus in the literature (National Research Council, 2010; NCATE, 2010), there is also an emerging empirical base that provides support for the value of these features as well.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers improve core instructional practices in teaching mathematics for problem solving through lesson study (LS). The core practices included launching a task, implementing a task, and orchestrating students’ solutions.

This study adopted multiple case study and survey methodologies. Each of three LS groups developed a research lesson on problem solving in algebra through Chinese LS, which includes collaborative planning and repeated teachings/debriefings of the research lesson with support from experts. The data collected included lesson plans, videotaped research lessons and debriefing meetings, and an end-of-project survey. Case studies supported by survey data were utilized to describe how research lessons were improved and what teachers learned from LS.

A fine-grained analysis of the data revealed that the participants improved their strategies for teaching for problem solving, which included effectively launching tasks, strategically implementing tasks, and productively orchestrating students’ solutions to the tasks. Further, analyses revealed that the feedback from experts during debriefing meetings played crucial roles in making these changes. Moreover, participants learned how to implement these core instructional practices and changed their views about students’ learning.

The study uncovers the mechanisms about how teachers improve teaching and their expertise in teaching through Chinese LS. The importance of the dynamic between repeated teaching and immediate feedback from knowledgeable others is highlighted.

The aim of this study was to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in Chinese upper secondary schools.

Based on survey answers from 1,074 upper secondary teachers in a Chinese city, path analysis was conducted to understand the relationship.

This study identified that a number of dimensions of teacher leadership (recognition, collegiality, participation and positive environment) had positive relationships with group competence. Meanwhile, the dimensions of developmental focus, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with task analysis. Additionally, when the authors treated collective efficacy as a single variable, the dimensions of developmental focus, congeniality, participation and positive environment had positive relationships with collective efficacy.

This study is to understand the relationship between teacher leadership and collective teacher efficacy in a collective culture and hierarchical education system.