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This chapter explores the benefits of joint lesson planning for student-teachers in two higher educational settings, one in Norway and the other in the UK. Lesson study is used as a vehicle for collaborative planning and teacher professional learning during field-practice in both contexts, but the models of lesson study implemented differ slightly to fit the respective initial teacher education (ITE) programmes. In both settings, however, student-teachers, mentor teachers and university tutors work in pairs or small groups to plan, teach and evaluate a research lesson together. The case studies reported in this chapter show the challenges which student-teachers face, but, at the same time, also reveal the potential of lesson study to open a dialogic space where they can share ideas with more experienced colleagues, gain greater awareness of the teaching and learning process and so become more effectively inducted into this community of practice. The chapter also explores the role of the ‘knowledgeable other(s)’, the issue of asymmetrical relationships in lesson study groups within the context of ITE and how this might impact on the learning of the different group members. Collaborative planning in lesson study groups in ITE is found to bridge the gap between what student-teachers learn during teacher training courses and what actually takes place in schools in the respective socio-cultural contexts discussed here.

This paper focuses on how one Student Teacher (ST) shifted his planning from teacher activities to student learning during a semester-long student-teaching practicum course in social studies. The study of this shift provides a glimpse of the enormity of the ST’s task and the ways in which he responds to the complexity of the work. Data include: lesson plans, providing a written record of activities, and classroom discourse. Analyses of the data rendered three areas relevant to the shift, including: 1) evidence of initiation-response-evaluation [IRE] script as a default script before the shift, 2) evidence of a shift to planning for student learning, and 3) evidence of movement away from the IRE to increasingly open-ended questioning. Preliminary evidence indicates increments that appear inconsequential taken individually, combine to present a picture of an incipient, developmental shift by the ST from planning for teacher activities to planning for student learning.

The authors developed a lesson study innovation for bridging pre-service teachers' experiences in an early methods course and clinical experiences focusing on the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). The authors analyze one planning meeting by a lesson study team comprised of four pre-service teachers and one cooperating teacher. The purpose of this research was to determine the nature of documentation during the online planning meeting and how the cooperating teacher facilitated the documentation process.

The authors used Gueudet and Trouche's (2009) documentation framework to determine the way the lesson study team in our study used all the resources available to plan a lesson. They analyzed the video recordings of the meeting to examine the interplay between material, didactical and mathematical components during the discussions. The material components included the Teacher Desmos Activity Builder and the eTextbook. The didactical components included assessment, scaffolding, multiple representations and problem-solving activities. The mathematical components pertained to systems of linear equations and inequalities with two variables.

The authors’ findings show that the cooperating teacher performed an invariant set of actions for improving the research lesson and, also, gave recommendations about how to implement the lesson. In facilitating the planning discussions, the cooperating teacher made explicit the relationship between material, didactical and mathematical components. The authors’ work has implications for supporting the preparation of facilitators of online planning sessions during lesson study.

The authors did not have access to the planning meeting where the PSTs created the draft of the research lesson. In addition, they are reporting the observations of only one online meeting.

The authors’ work has implications for supporting the preparation of facilitators of online planning sessions during lesson study.

This paper presents a recommendation on how one requirement elicitation technique supports the other techniques in defining system requirement for a case-based system. A case-based lesson planning system aims to assist teachers in constructing quality lesson plans through its cycle which begins with case retrieval. To retrieve relevant lesson plans, appropriate inputs should be used and the intended output needs to be identified via suitable requirement elicitation techniques. The use of a single technique might result in inadequate requirement specification, thus affecting the quality of the output requirements as well as quality of the final information system.

Requirement elicitation was carried out in three phases: phase I involved document review, phase II was an interview and phase III used a survey. Respondents of the study comprised experienced teachers as well as new teachers. This research used both qualitative and quantitative approaches to answer the research questions, which involved semi-structured interviews, document review and survey to collect the relevant data. Documents were reviewed by analysing lesson plans from three different countries. In addition, a review of lesson plans prepared by teachers and the standard syllabus were carried out. Findings from the document review were used in structured interviews using a teach-back technique, sorting and matrix of attribute-values. A questionnaire was then constructed based on the interviews and document review.

The findings of this initial study, as part of a larger research investigation, would help in knowledge modelling and representation. This will contribute to effective case retrieval via good design of the system input and output. The study identifies important elements of a lesson plan according to their ranking. Keywords that were used by teachers as input for retrieval were identified together with the expected output.

The main goal of requirement elicitation is to specify complete and detailed requirements of the proposed system. There are two main types of requirement: functional and non-functional requirements. This paper only focuses on functional requirements – specifically case retrieval with appropriate input and output.

Various requirement engineering (RE) techniques can be applied in different phases of requirement elicitation. Suitable technique should be chosen at different phases of RE, as it is important for triangulation purposes. Incomplete RE will affect the modelling part of system development, and, thus, affect the design and implementation of an information system.

Software engineer or anybody involved in system development should plan accordingly for the RE process. They should be creative and reasonable in selecting suitable RE techniques to be applied.

This study aims to gain understanding of the various aspects of lesson planning. Crucial knowledge in lesson planning that was gathered from the elicitation phase is modelled to have a good understanding of the problems and constraints among teachers. The findings of this initial study, as part of a larger research investigation, would help in knowledge modelling and representation. This will contribute to effective case retrieval via a good design of the system input and output.

There is a tacit understanding among social studies teachers and educators that incorporating primary source documents in planning and teaching is desirable for many reasons, most prominent among them the ways in which it challenges students to think at higher levels. This study is a descriptive study of public school teachers’ uses of primary source documents in social studies planning, in which we review lesson activities of various grade level teachers to evaluate their use of primary documents for higher order cognitive purposes. Given the salient theme of critical thinking in the literature, we established a baseline continuum of uses that served as our framework for evaluating these activities. We asked the following questions: When history teachers incorporate the use of primary source documents in their planning, to what degree do they promote development of higher level critical thinking? What might a planned activity look like when they do? We found that the majority of the activities examined here employ primary source documents for lower order purposes but held the promise of easy transition to higher order uses.

Despite numerous kinds of research regarding the potential of lesson study (LS) in internship and microteaching in teacher education curricula, studies examining the adaptation of LS in the lesson planning (LP) course have not been established. To fill this gap, this study aims to explore the perceptions of pre-service biology teachers of an adapted LS in the LP course toward their instructional design skills and teaching competency.

This study opted for basic qualitative studies. The participants were eleven pre-service biology teachers in their third year who had already taken a LP course. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Collected data were then transcribed and thematically analyzed using grounded theory and focused on participants' perceptions about the development of their teaching competency in lesson planning through LS.

The findings revealed that participants appreciated the planning and consultation phases, teaching practice, peer observation as well as observer feedback from the reflection phase in supporting the development of their basic teaching skills. There was also a change in their perceptions related to the concept of teaching.

The findings of this study offer insight regarding the benefits and challenges of involving pre-service biology teacher students in the LS for biology teacher education programs with a focus on the method or LP course.

In consideration of the needs of the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking emergent bilingual students in U.S. classrooms who are learning English as a new language, this study explores the teachers’ understanding of instructional practice using a specific pedagogical framework designed for emergent bilingual classroom contexts called Preview/View/Review (P/V/R). A constructivist and a translanguaging lens informed the theoretical framework for this study. One set of qualitative data from interviews was collected from a random sample of teachers who participated in a Master’s program in bilingual education in a border university in South Texas. Interview questions focused on the teachers’ reflections on the planning for and the implementation of the pedagogical structure P/V/R in their dual language contexts. Three findings arose from the data: (a) participants demonstrated an understanding of planning for and implementation of the P/V/R structure as a scaffold to build background knowledge of new concepts in the different disciplines; (b) the P/V/R structure has the potential to facilitate cross-linguistic transfer and the potential to be implemented as a form of translanguaging pedagogy; and (c) the implementation of a well-planned P/V/R structure enhances students’ engagement with the learning in two languages. One identifiable limitation of the study is the small size of the sample. In addition, classroom observations of the implementation of the structure are needed to mitigate the possible over-reporting of P/V/R as a good practice on the part of the teachers. Insights from this study inform teacher educators in teacher preparation programs who are preparing teachers for working with emergent bilingual learners and the professional development of all teachers, including those who teach in bilingual school contexts.

Purpose – Teachers should plan instruction that integrates digital tools into instruction in meaningful ways to promote students’ use of multimodalities. Therefore, it is useful for teacher educators to expose pre-service teachers (PSTs) to a systematic approach to integrating a variety of digital tools into their instruction. In this chapter, the authors discuss on the Technology Integration Planning Cycle (TIPC; Hutchison & Woodward, 2014a, 2014b) as one systematic approach for teachers and teacher educators to consider.

Design – This chapter describes the promise of using the TIPC with PSTs to demonstrate and practice how to plan effective literacy instruction to support students’ use of multimodalities. The chapter includes a rich description of how the use of the TIPC might take shape in a literacy methods course based on a composite of courses, students, and activities that the authors have experimented with over time.

Findings – Using the TIPC with PSTs requires a structured approach (Hutchison & Colwell, 2016) that includes modeling and scaffolding of PSTs’ knowledge of technology and pedagogy (Beschorner & Kruse, 2016). Therefore, the Gradual Release of Responsibility (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) might be valuable to consider as a guiding framework for planning course activities and assignments that utilize the TIPC. This chapter provides an example of this type of instruction.

Practical Implications – There is a significant need to prepare twenty-first century learners to read and write multimodal text. Thus, supporting PSTs to increase their self-efficacy in using technology for instruction and providing the conditions necessary to develop pedagogical beliefs that make it likely for them to be able to integrate technology in meaningful ways is vital (Ertmer, 2005). Using the TIPC in a literacy methods course in the ways that model and scaffold its use, might be one approach to creating these conditions.

Planning is a critical step in the process toward quality instruction and should also include consideration for what technology is appropriate for the lesson. Teacher educators must assist preservice teachers in learning this critical planning step of the instructional cycle. The purpose of this article is to present a step‐by‐step procedure to be used by preservice teachers when determining the appropriate use of technology in instruction.

Various strategies have been used by teacher educators to facilitate preservice teachers’ learning how to integrate technology. Some of these strategies are the modeling of technology integration by university instructors, the exposure to the use of technology in the classrooms during field experience, and including technology into the curriculum. In spite of these efforts, there is evidence that some teacher educators feel that preservice teachers are still not convinced of the value of integrating technology in their lessons. This article suggests that perhaps preservice teachers are still reluctant about the benefit of integrating technology because they have not been given a process for deciding which form(s) of technology should be used for what kind of instruction.

Included are charts with detailed descriptions, providing a step‐by‐step process for integrating technology into instruction. These charts demonstrate that the decision about what technology to use in a lesson is first based upon the needs of the learners and the material being taught.

This process demonstrates that technology is transparent: curriculum and the needs of learners drive the choice of technology, instead of technology being used just for technology sake.