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This Higher Education Academy funded study explored learning challenges faced by international students early in their post-graduate courses through the use of Participatory Lesson Study (PLS). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Two approaches to PLS were explored. Students were interviewed after “research lesson seminars” about their learning experiences; before two seminars, groups of students participated in planning meetings to inform preparation of seminar content and activities.

Results suggest that PLS encourages a deep consideration of pedagogy by lecturers. Observation of student learning and post-seminar interviews highlighted the complex nature of the learning that unfolds during seminars. In some cases, student explanation of learning was dissonant with observations.

This was a small-scale project which cannot offer generalised implications for practice. However, it should act as a starting point to develop PLS on a larger scale and in other pedagogic contexts.

This project led to reassessment of lecturers’ pedagogic assumptions and to development of new approaches. Thematic analysis of pre- and post-seminar student responses highlighted several important issues: variation in approaches to participation in seminars, variable use of technologies to support learning, importance of differentiation for learning and task-types preferred by learners.

Results suggest that PLS facilitates the study of learning in higher education and the development of pedagogy, informed by and responsive to the needs of international students. As such, it has the potential to support any tutors working in higher education, whilst having wider, general utility to other groups approaching the development of pedagogy through Lesson Study.

This study arises from a recent school-based professional development (PD) programme conducted for English language teachers (ELTs) in a secondary school in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where a participatory lesson study (PLS) strategy was implemented to develop four ELTs' teaching skills and their senior teacher's leadership. The influence of the PLS on creating a participatory PD experience for the participants was investigated through exploring their perceptions of their professional growth during their PLS experience.

Following a qualitative interpretive approach, a total of eight lesson study cases and 16 meetings were conducted and analysed.

The main factors that influenced the participants' perceptions of their professional growth in PLS were high self-efficacy and confidence; dominancy of their peers; the informality of the PLS practice; and reflective practice. Relatedly, the results revealed critical thoughts about PLS as a means for ELT's self-directed PD in non-native English-speaking contexts.

The study provides an alternative approach to PD that can be offered for ELTs in any ESL/EFL context that focusses on supporting non-native English-speaking teachers' practices by associating theory with practice. This approach has enabled them to gain the practical skills they need and develop their awareness about the theoretical principles of these practices. For the first time, teachers were given the role to act as the trainers and the theorisers of their own teaching practices.

While Lesson Studies are usually defined as “teacher-led” collaborative research for the purpose of improving teaching, one Japanese junior high school has conducted “student-led” Lesson Studies (SLS) for the past 20 years. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how this school involves students in the Lesson Study process to identify the importance of learners’ perspectives and create the best learning environment.

Using the case study method, the researcher observed the lesson study process, research lessons and pre-lesson and post-lesson discussions with teachers and students at the case school, as well as examining the school’s annual reports. One-on-one interviews were held with the principal and teachers at the case school. A group interview was conducted with 18 students (8th grade), and additional interviews were held with four students and a Homeroom Teacher. All interviews were recorded and analyzed based on self-regulated learning theory.

In SLS, students observe the learning activities in other classes and compare them with their own learning activities. Thus, they come to view their in-class learning process in a metacognitive way and can collaborate with teachers to reflect on their learning process and to create a more effective learning environment.

While previous studies on Lesson Study have consisted of artificial/experimental one-time practices involving acute researcher-led interventions, this paper uniquely investigates genuine, daily practices that teachers and students developed on their own. This research is of considerable interest as it goes beyond traditional studies in Japan.

The purpose of this collaborative self-study inquiry was to enhance the professional practice of faculty members through the adoption of lesson study. A seven-member faculty of education self-study group engaged in lesson study in a computer and learning resources for primary/elementary teachers’ course with teacher candidates.

This study focused on providing teacher candidates with increased opportunities for action and expression during in-class instruction. This collaborative lesson study inquiry (Fernandez et al., 2003; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Murata, 2011) involved the four-step process of planning, doing, checking and acting (PDCA) (Cheng, 2019). Several data collection methods were adopted and data sources analyzed.

Challenges the group encountered during the study included ascertaining the goals of lesson study and offering critical feedback to each other. While this made decision-making more intricate and intentional, there was exceptional value in participating in the lesson study process. The results revealed three overarching themes: 1) challenges in classroom observations; 2) hesitation in providing supportive feedback to colleagues and 3) deliberations regarding what constitutes expertise within subject-specific preservice teacher education.

While lesson study has been adopted fairly extensively in K-12 settings, its adoption in postsecondary education is limited (Chenault, 2017). Considering the merits of lesson study for K-12 practitioners, this research investigated the similar advantages that lesson study might have for postsecondary education faculty, students and programs.

Lesson study (LS) is a collaborative form of action research. Collaboration is central to LS methodology, therefore exploring and expanding the understanding of the collaborative features that occur in LS is a priority. This paper explores the features of collaboration in existing publications on LS to consider if, as Quaresma (2020) notes, collaboration is simplistically referred to within LS research.

Utilising a qualitative review of LS literature to explore LS collaboration through Mynott's (2019) outcome model and Huxham and Vangen's (2005) theory of collaborative advantage and inertia. 396 publications using “lesson study” and “collaboration” as key words were considered and reviewed, with 26 articles further analysed and coded, generating a collaborative feature matrix.

While collaboration in LS is referred to generically in the articles analysed, the authors found examples where collaboration is considered at a meta, meso and micro level (Lemon and Salmons, 2021), and a balance between collaborative advantage and inertia. However, only a small proportion of LS publications discuss collaboration in depth and, while the matrix will support future research, more focus needs to be given to how collaboration functions within LS.

Through answering Robutti et al.'s (2016) question about what can be learnt from the existing LS research studies on collaboration, this paper builds on Mynott's (2019) outcome model by providing a detailed matrix of collaborative features that can be found in LS work. This matrix has applications beyond the paper for use by facilitators, leaders of LS, and researchers to explore their LS collaborations through improved understanding of collaboration.

Against the backdrop of China’s curriculum reform, this paper explores how a Chinese lesson study (CLS) of English literature instruction in a senior high school promotes the teacher participant’s professional development (PD) in teacher beliefs and emotions, teaching contents, teaching approaches and learner outcomes.

This study adopted the CLS approach to explore the teacher participant, Lily’s PD. Three rounds of CLS of short fiction instruction were conducted. Triangulated data including interviews, reflection journals, discussion notes and lesson materials were collected for directed qualitative content analysis.

The results show that through the CLS, Lily has (1) changed her beliefs about the curriculum and literature instruction, and improved her emotion management and become more resilient and motivated; (2) shifted her teaching focus from forms and facts to meanings; (3) adopted a more learner-centred and inquiry-based teaching approach and (4) received satisfactory learner outcomes including increased learner participation and quality output. The follow-up class observations suggest the sustainability of such development.

This study applies and validates a conceptual framework of teachers’ PD, and establishes the value of promoting curriculum reform and facilitating EFL teachers’ PD through CLS and literature instruction.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the learning of individual teachers participating in lesson study collaboration by adapting a participatory framework about teacher learning; and second, to investigate the potential of this framework compared with other approaches used in lesson study research.

The authors use collective case studies. By being participant observers the authors provide detailed descriptions of two selected teachers’ lived experiences of lesson study collaboration. In addition to gain first-hand insights, the authors conducted interviews before, between and after two rounds of lesson studies, and recorded the various lesson study activities.

This paper provides empirical insights into the complexity of teacher learning. By using the participatory framework, the authors identify significant shifts in the participation of each of the two teachers during a two-year lesson study project. By comparing these shifts the authors identify significant conditions for their individual learning.

Although the study is small scale, both the insights into the different ways in which teachers participated and the theoretical insights might be valuable for other lesson study research approaches.

This paper provides valuable insights into conditions that might influence teachers’ participation in lesson study activities, especially in cultures with little experience of lesson study.

This paper fulfils a need to investigate individual teachers’ learning in lesson study collaborations. It also contributes to deeper theoretical understandings of teacher learning which have been called for in recent lesson study research.

Public organizations have interacted with citizens through increasingly sophisticated internet-enabled technology. Participatory platforms emerged from Web 2.0 technologies in the mid-2000s as a governance mechanism to engage citizens in the process of effecting social change. Although the potential of platforms is recognized, its successful implementation has faced challenges. To begin to get a handle on how to best design and manage participatory platforms, we conducted an exploratory participatory action research study grounded in two events – The Policy Challenge and NSF Workshop on Participatory Platforms with a Public Intent. Both events communed practitioners, scholars, and citizen participants with diverse experience and expertise conducting and researching platforms. The insights expressed through the events and follow-up interviews and online survey informed our development of a participatory platform lifecycle and design framework to assist designing successful participatory platforms.

This paper aims to demonstrate how participatory design methodologies can be used for the design of interactive learning tools for children.

This paper presents the methodology employed for the design of a multimedia tool for teaching Greek to young children aged 6 to 12. The preliminary data collection included interviews, questionnaires and observations, whereas the actual design of the tool was carried out using a Participatory Design methodology which advocates a design approach that focuses on the intended user of the service or product, emphasising the active involvement of users throughout the design process.

The paper provides detailed information from each of the data collection techniques used. It also highlights the successes and difficulties in implementing participatory design in an e‐learning context.

Although participatory design has been used in the design of other systems, it is rarely used as the design framework of learning applications. So the paper expands one's knowledge of implementing participatory design methodologies in learning.