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The purpose of this paper is to communicate how Japanese culture impacts upon mentoring in schools in Japan and to report on a study of mentor and novice teacher dialogue. The study is located within the context of explanations of dialogue, practical knowledge and mentoring as collaborative enquiry. It concludes that the time spent by novice teachers in Japanese schools is too short for mentoring to move beyond an apprenticeship model.

In this small study conducted between June 2006 and February 2007, the dialogues between a female novice teacher and a male mentor, who had 27 years’ teaching experience, were analyzed on three occasions. According to the mentoring analysis system developed by the author and his colleagues, all discussion was recorded between the mentor and the mentee about the mentee's teaching using a digital recorder and a video camera. A transcript was made from both recordings, then morphological analysis used (a kind of text analysis) for the transcript, and nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs were identified in transcripts.

In total, 46 teaching scenarios were analyzed, where the mentor was offering his comments about a total of three recorded lessons by the mentee. Patterns of linguistic interaction between the mentor and mentee during dialogues were noted down and attempts made to identify a dialectical process (of thesis, antithesis and synthesis).

The study undertaken took place over one year in one elementary school in Japan. The practice of mentoring is not widespread in schools and can usefully be extended.

For teachers to become collaborative enquirers, undertaking collaborative research focused on developing teachers’ practical knowledge, the period of initial teacher development for novice teachers could usefully be extended in schools in Japan.

The impact of culture and, in particular, in‐group (uchi) and out‐group (soto) culture in schools in Japan needs to be understood so that novice teachers can be accepted as part of the school's in‐group.

The paper describes a unique study into the impact of culture in Japanese schools and, in particular, into the impact of uchi (in‐group) and soto (out‐group) traditions that reinforce the apprenticeship model of teachers’ induction into the profession.

This chapter traces the development of teacher knowledge in the field of education from the 1970s onward. It pays attention to the conceptualizations of personal knowledge and personal practical knowledge and relates pedagogical content knowledge to the aforementioned concepts. It then moves on to the more expansive topic of teacher learning in community paying particular attention to dialogical and relational ways of knowing. The work covers intellectual ground that has been traveled and signals new areas where research is likely to be conducted.

It has been suggested that, if pedagogical and learning theories are integrated into lesson and learning study, a systematic construction of pedagogical knowledge is possible (Elliott, 2012). In this Special Issue, it is reported how theory and theoretical concepts can add value to lesson and learning study. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Special Issue and explore the above concepts.

This paper presents the Special Issue papers thematically and the main issues are discussed.

Together the papers suggest that pedagogical theories and theorizing practice may contribute to the improvement of teachers’ practical knowledge and knowledge about teachers’ professional tasks and objects. Furthermore, some theories and theoretical concepts hitherto under-exploited in lesson and learning study are presented and discussed from the point of view how these might improve the quality of the studies.

As a total, this collection of papers bring out issues about the role of pedagogical and learning theories and how these could inform lesson and learning study.

The Chinese system of education is shifting from an examination orientation to a more creative approach in order to increase educational quality. The New Curriculum in China requires not only changes in content and form, but also sets higher expectations for teachers’ instructional strategies and quality course design. Against this policy backdrop, China developed and implemented the School-Based Instructional Research (SBIR) model to improve teachers’ professional knowledge and development. In this ISATT anniversary chapter, our discussion revolves around the theme of SBIR, including its origin, progression, process, elements, and methods. To end, we summarize the expectations and prospects for SBIR in the Chinese educational context.

The study seeks to understand what teachers know about students’ friend networks and how they use that information for instruction.

This qualitative study relied on interviews and sociograms that teachers drew of students’ friend networks.

Our data suggest that teachers’ awareness of their students’ friend networks varies by their experience and their exposure to students. Also, their use of this information for instruction coalesces around dimensions of grouping and social support.

This study took place at one school. To more deeply understand what teachers perceive about their students’ friend networks and how they use that information for instruction, more studies could be done with teachers in more schools.

Implications might suggest developing teachers’ social competence to support their students’ learning and development.

While studies cited in this paper have explored teachers’ knowledge of students’ social networks, this study builds on this work by exploring how that information can be useful for instruction. In addition, this study explores the use of teachers drawing sociograms as representations of what they know about students’ friend networks.

The purpose of this paper is to present the possibilities offered by Lesson and Learning Studies (LLS) for training and for improving and generating knowledge by reconstructing the practical knowledge of teachers in university training through joint design, observation and reflection. In short, the research aims to show how merging LLS contributes to developing fundamental teaching skills in new, uncertain contexts and to recreating processes of research and analysis of complex situations from critical and creative perspectives by involving university teachers and student teachers in disciplined, informed reflection on their own practice through shared, narrative productions in a dual spiral which promotes the contrasting of experiences and perspectives in an ongoing manner.

A case study of own practice in a university master’s degree, the aim of which is to develop a training improvement process by following the stages of LLS.

The case study shows the need to reverse the theory-practice sequence and to increase the importance of experience, the relevance of tutoring in the role of teachers, and the significance of cooperation and contrast as learning strategies. The evidence presented shows that LLS can be an extremely useful resource and procedure to reconstruct practical knowledge, facilitating internal contrast between the different espoused theories of the members of the group of teachers, and also between their espoused theories and their practical knowledge, in other words their theories-in-use.

The paper explores the value of LLS to reconstruct the practical knowledge of university teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to show, from a theoretical point of view, the promising relationship between the processes generated by Lesson Studies (LS) and the development of practical thinking in in-service teacher training, derived from two pieces of research.

The authors propose broadening the focus of LS in order to not only improve the “lesson” or “teaching” – in short, practice – but also to reconstruct and improve the practical knowledge of teachers. The core issue of the paper is the discussion about the relationship between the practical knowledge, the knowledge that every teacher uses in his or her daily practice, theories-in-use, mostly unconscious, and the conscious and explicit knowledge, practical thinking, explicit theory, they use to describe and justify their practice.

Knowing our practical knowledge intuitive Gestalt, and building a new conscious and informed way of thinking is not enough, we need to build through systematic new practice a new way of doing, a new way of perceiving, interpreting, taking decisions and acting, coherent with our new theories. LS reinforces these two complementary movements: the practical theorizing movement, the reflexion on action to discover the implicit believes, habits, attitudes and emotions underlying the practice, and the experimentation of the new theory to form the new habits, beliefs, attitudes and emotions that support the development of a new form of teaching. This second movement needs more time and adequate teaching context, confirming the long spiral cycle of LS.

With emphasis on the dialectical relationship between practical theorizing and the experimentation of theory, this paper could set out a new approach for LSs as a method of teacher training which can improve practice through the reconstruction of the practical thinking of those involved.

Teacher researcher pedagogy (TRP) is a national-based pedagogy in Iran. This pedagogy has been introduced and adopted to Iran’s teacher education system from 1996. In line with this pedagogy, we studied the narratives of the teachers who were already involved in TRP to understand how it helped them reconstruct their professional identity. We found this pedagogy helped teachers improve their professional consciousness. The teachers with good manners and methods could take obviously significant advantage of TRP and involve in reflective practical research. As a consequence, an epistemological shift happened in the professional life of such caring teachers where they no longer only use the knowledge of a third-party person. Such conditions recovered teachers’ professional identity and put them in power position.