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The purpose of this paper is to examine how teachers engaged in curriculum deliberation through lesson study (LS) and how different types of teacher knowledge were elicited, co-constructed and transformed in integrated ways across LS stages. It also clarifies how different school-level orientations influence the nature, depth and scope of the deliberation.

The study adopted an interpretive qualitative case study approach involving two schools, employing participant observations of LS cycles and post-LS teacher interviews. Thematic analysis and analytical coding were conducted.

The two cases revealed core features of curriculum deliberation trajectories enabled by LS: problem identification, planning to unlock the educative potential of content and reflection on enactment for improvement. The types of teacher knowledge that informed deliberation on English language learning were uncovered to reveal LS teams' initial comprehension, collective reasoning and actions, and new knowledge derived. Pedagogical content knowledge was prominently drawn on in unlocking curriculum potential and transformed with the knowledge of student learning gained from the live lesson observations. The school-level orientations were found to influence the extent to which teachers can interrogate existing practices and co-construct knowledge.

The study offers a nuanced understanding of curriculum thinking in LS teams, which is enabled by processes that construct the dialogic space for coordinating curriculum commonplaces to transform content into pedagogical representations to cultivate students' future capacities. It highlights the importance of viewing sustainable LS from an interconnected perspective that calls attention to the social contexts of deliberation.

The purpose of this paper is to report on how a grade level team in a Singapore primary school used lesson study to mediate the implementation of the English language national curriculum. It aims to explore how this process had mobilised different teachers’ knowledge, challenged their beliefs of teaching and student learning, and created impact on their learning and knowledge.

An interpretive qualitative study using a case study methodology was employed. Data collected included participant observations and individual interviews. Transcripts of lesson study discussions were open coded for the content of teacher discourse and the sources of influences on the teachers’ reasoning and action.

The findings indicate that each stage of the lesson process engaged teachers’ deliberative discourse differently and constituted their building a common inquiry stance into the problem of student learning in reading and writing, moving away from a lesson-based view to embracing a curriculum-based deliberation, and challenging their shared assumptions and enabling their learning to adopt the students’ lens in improving the research lesson.

This study provides an illustrative case on how teachers’ talk about work practices in lesson study mediated teacher learning in a group context. The study established the importance of an interconnected view of teacher interaction in lesson study that factored in the consideration of the influences at the teachers’ level and at the school’s level that enabled and/ or impeded a broader consideration of practice and richer conditions for the mentoring of novice teachers in the team.

In this chapter, three educators recount experiences of professional development from different perspectives in order to examine the intersection of teacher knowledge and subject matter in the areas of science and mathematics education. Professional development projects are productive avenues for exploring this phenomenon. We share stories of experience from professional develop projects of teachers who were situated in different places on the professional knowledge landscape: one elementary school teacher, one teacher educator, and one mathematics educator. From these various vantage points, the relationship between mathematics and science content knowledge and teacher knowledge holds different complexities and complications. Issues related to balancing teacher knowledge with content knowledge in professional development emerge. Based on the stories of experience and the analysis of the narratives, deliberation of curriculum is seen to be a valuable concept when engaging in professional development with teachers. Further, Pragmatic Intellectual Space is proposed for productive approaches to professional development.

Through this exploration of subject matter knowledge and teacher knowledge, we present two stories of teaching social studies in the sixth grade. Using a narrative inquiry approach, we share the complexities and complications of teaching children content within standards related to world history and religions. We call on the writings of Schwab to consider these experiences. Using Schwab’s concepts of deliberation, the balanced negotiation between the commonplaces of curriculum in a meaning-making process, first, exposes tensions and the teacher’s acts of negotiating between the learners’ needs and the subject matter (the standards). The teacher stretches to meet the requirements of the standards in different ways that take care of herself and her students. Schwab’s commonplaces are used in a more straightforward exploration of the second story. The interplay between the commonplaces is less nuanced and less deeply understood, coalescing in tensions between the commonplaces. The stories and our analyses illustrate Schwab’s assertion that there is no right alternative. Daily, and moment-to-moment, teachers are in the position of deliberating – making the best choice of many alternatives. “Ramifying consequences must be traced to all parts of the curriculum” (Schwab, 1978, p. 319). Schwab, we find, counsels that the consequences of a chosen action must be considered by all those who must live with those consequences.

This chapter addresses the balancing act between curriculum guidance and curriculum space, against the backdrop of an integral curriculum review at the national/macro level in the Netherlands, labelled ‘Curriculum.nu’. As part of this review initiative, many choices have to be made, reflecting answers to the following two questions: What balance is needed between curriculum regulation at the macro level and the provision of curricular space for schools at the meso and the micro level? And, what are the related responsibilities of all involved in the educational system web in order to make the curriculum change successful? Before getting to tentative answers, the chapter will provide an introduction to curriculum policy in the Netherlands and will offer an overview of the motives, aims, approaches and preliminary results of Curriculum.nu. The provisional answers include a set of research-informed principles for making the curriculum review efforts a success, including a call for dovetailing the various curriculum layers and for a strategic curriculum mix of room for school-specific decision-making, substantive guidance, support by exemplification and firm investments in professional development.

This study examines how a social studies methods course, with an emphasis in civic education, is taught and carried through from its original implementation within a teacher education social studies course to practicing teachers’ classrooms. Findings suggest that by implementing social action curriculum projects teachers: 1) effectively integrated emerging curriculum, 2) facilitated student-led instruction in a democratic classroom, 3) increased effective communication and built partnerships beyond the classroom, and 4) used structured reflections as a tool for growth and evaluation.

To illuminate the importance of the communal deliberative process, as a form of collective thinking, in overcoming the growing complexities of schoolwork in uncertain and turbulent environments.

Introduces the notion of deliberation as evolved from Dewey's moral theory, the essential phases and elements of deliberative activities and the principal's role in facilitating this communal process.

Provides information on the stepping‐stones towards communal deliberation, while recognizing its major impediments.

In light of structural restructuring efforts that have not yielded significant effects in issues of teaching and learning, this paper offers the rhetorical process of communal deliberation as a means for developing schools that learn.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to retell the narratives of a preservice teacher and a teacher educator as they lived a story of critical literacy and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives.

Approach – The chapter presents a year-long narrative inquiry centered on the revisioning of curriculum for an undergraduate literacy course for preservice teachers.

Findings – The researcher broadened her understanding of teacher and teacher educators as curriculum makers to include preservice teachers as curriculum makers. As preservice teachers in the literacy course were invited to reflect on their own literacy backgrounds, several crucial narratives emerged that shaped new understandings for the researcher/teacher educator and drew her into her own curriculum-making with moral purpose. One preservice teacher began a journey of narrative authority and curriculum-making as a curriculum of lives in a subsequent field experience, even through the mire of political pressure in schools.

Research implications – The preservice teacher's retelling featured children who discovered newfound understandings of social justice through literary ways of knowing and critical literacy events. She developed new understandings of how to help public school students value and define their literacies and their life events, all of which folded back into the undergraduate literacy course.

Value – Teacher educators can be encouraged to walk in relationship with their preservice teachers, valuing human experiences and lives as curriculum rather than relenting to top-down, politically driven, outside curriculum.

This paper discusses the efficacy of a model of benchmarking toward best practices in learning assessment in higher education. It outlines the need for best practices in learning assessment and reports findings on a comprehensive model of assessing learning outcomes of an undergraduate business program. By developing competency expectations of students, the model led to a multi‐method data collection/analysis toward benchmarking learning outcomes. The findings demonstrate how benchmarking leads to continuous curriculum improvement of instructional process and the curriculum. The authors claimed that in the absence of a generally accepted model, if the methodology is replicated, it may lead to the best practices in assessing learning outcomes of an undergraduate business program.