Search results

Recent decades have seen a growing consensus that as the demands on teachers becomes increasingly complex, improving the effectiveness of both initial teacher education (ITE) and career-long professional development is key to school improvement. ITE in particular has been for too long polarised at policy level, between ‘theory-led’ and ‘practice-led’ approaches. This chapter discusses how this polarisation is simplistic and unhelpful and highlights the benefits of the more constructive orientation towards a synergistic relationship between theory and practice that can occur, particularly when schools and universities collaborate closely in bringing new teachers into the profession. This chapter sets the scene for subsequent chapters in this book by signalling the potential for the collaborative inquiry-based lesson study model into ITE to enhance partnerships between schools and universities and contribute to a smooth transition from ITE into lifelong professional learning.

This chapter examines how lesson study is reported with pre-service teachers in initial teacher education programmes. Different voices are included talking about the ways in which lesson study has been reported in various settings so far. The chapter concludes with a qualitative study of student-teachers’ reflections drawn from their reports, written after finalising the lesson study cycle at the Universidad Católica de Valencia. The analysis provides support for the premise that lesson study significantly promotes research in ITE and develops a more critical approach to literature about pedagogy and good practice in teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to study an adapted version of lesson used with mentors and student-teachers in a one-year initial teacher education (ITE) programme for prospective teachers of geography and modern languages. In partnership with eight secondary schools, the effectiveness of the lesson study cycle was evaluated as a vehicle for exploration of approaches to aid student-teacher learning during school placements.

In total, 12 lesson study case studies were completed and analysed.

Three principal findings emerged: first, most collaborating mentors and student-teachers reported that they engaged in a reflexive process, exploring the complexity of teaching, each learning more about the characteristics of teaching; second, in cases where collaboration allowed student-teachers a degree of autonomy, lesson study provided a collaborative scaffold for understanding the complexity of teaching, contributing to professional development along a continuum which the authors tentatively term “pedagogic literacy”; third and less positively, some mentors struggled to shed the shackles of traditional roles, dominating the discourse as advice-givers so that a traditional “parallel” approach to mentoring continued.

The work expands the experiential base of lesson study efforts in ITE in the UK and elaborates a view of teacher learning that challenges reductive approaches to the preparation of new teachers. For the first time, it presents student-teacher and mentor perspectives on the use of lesson study in teaching practice in England.

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.

Over the last decade there has been considerable growth in the role that psychiatric nurses play in providing care for the mentally disordered offender (MDO). Yet there has been little written about this specialty from a global perspective. Examination of the literature illustrates a large body of research and development programmes reporting the development of services to the MDO, for example, self‐harm and clinical risk assessment. Such service development is growing at a rapid pace, yet training and education to meet the needs of this patient group is something that is added onto post registration courses. Furthermore, the lack of vision and career pathways into forensic care is stifling a growing profession, which is subject to continual permanent change and investigation. Leaders and professional associations have contributed little to this unique nursing group which plays a major role in the multidisciplinary care of a very demanding set of patient needs.

This chapter aims to give a general overview of the history and philosophy of lesson study together with a general outline of a typical lesson study cycle. It also aims to address the use of lesson study as a useful tool in the professional development of both pre- and in-service teachers. Finally, it will look at possibilities of using lesson study as the basis of a new partnership agreement between higher education institutions and schools which will benefit all parties.

This chapter discusses the focus of learning in lesson study research in initial teacher education. Whose learning should be considered in lesson study cycles? The learning of the student-teachers, the learning of the pupils or both? Relevance theory implies that meaningful interaction develops as a consequence of the heuristic interplay between the communicative and the cognitive principles of relevance, that is, the dynamics of any given interaction create meaning as the interactional process unfolds and relevance is maximised. The participants in the interaction at hand will thus create the best solution in any given set of circumstances. They will subconsciously strive towards the most relevant outcome of their interaction, which equals maximisation of relevance irrespective of the quality of the outcome. This approach will be used to discuss the role of the student-teachers and the pupils in learning processes and lesson study cycles. The student-teachers influence the interactional process from the point of view of the communicative principle of relevance, and the pupils influence the interactional process from the point of view of the cognitive principle of relevance. These dynamics will also have a bearing on the unfolding of the lesson study cycle, and consequently imply that lesson study research should take into account the learning of both the student-teachers and the pupils from the point of view of collaborative learning and reflective practices.

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.