Rebecca Perry

Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) has spread outside Japan in the last decade, providing opportunities to see how lesson study fares in countries where the instructional practices and curriculum materials differ from those in Japan. This study reports an elementary mathematics lesson study cycle from the United States. To investigate the nature of the support for teachers' learning during the curriculum study ("kyouzai kenkyuu") phase of lesson study, we first compared a US. and Japanese teacher's manual in their treatment of area of quadrilaterals. The coding scheme captured features hypothesized to influence teachers' learning from curriculum including information on student thinking, learning trajectory and rationale for pedagogical decisions (Ball & Cohen, 1996). While the US. teacher's manual provided more correct student answers and more often suggested adaptations for particular categories of students (e.g., English-language learners), the Japanese manual provided more varied individual student responses and more rationale for pedagogical choices. We provided the Japanese curriculum and teacher's c manual to a US. lesson group and observed them during lesson study; US. teachers found some Japanese curriculum features useful (e.g., student thinking) and other features challenging (e.g., focus on a single problem). A comparison of the US. teachers' pre-and post-lesson study cycle lesson plans suggested that the teachers more thoroughly anticipated student thinking after working with the Japanese textbooks and teacher's manuals. We suggest that kyouzai kenkyuu on a well-designed teacher's manual may enable "coherent curriculum" at the policy level to be enacted in the classroom.

Lesson study, a Japanese form of professional development that centers on collaborative study of live classroom lessons, has spread rapidly in the United States since 1999. Drawing on examples of Japanese and U.S. lesson study, we propose that three types of research are needed if lesson study is to avoid the fate of so many other once-promising reforms that were discarded before being fully understood or well implemented. The proposed research includes development of a descriptive knowledge base; explication of the innovation’s mechanism; and iterative cycles of improvement research. We identify six changes in the structure and norms of educational research that would enhance the field’s capacity to study emerging innovations such as lesson study. These changes include rethinking the routes from educational research to educational improvement and recognizing a “local proof route”; building research methods and norms that will better enable us to learn from innovation practitioners; and increasing our capacity to learn across cultural boundaries.