Heng Jiang

In this study, we investigated how lesson study can be adapted into a blended format to support collaborations between two teacher educators, one works in Singapore and the other in Finland, to explore how they themselves could grow professionally and foster student learning. In spite of the challenges, this blended lesson study project helped the team to (1) make the students' thinking more explicit via classroom assessment, (2) engage students in the critical analysis of alternative perspectives for reflecting upon their professional practices, and (3) provide feedback to the teacher educators on how to tap into different pedagogical approaches to help students find relevance between various theories and practice. We identified four elements that fostered teacher educators' professional growth: explicating respective cultural understandings of teaching and learning, discussing student learning evidence to inform instructional decisions, hybridising different perspectives, and intercultural reflections. These four elements formed a framework of blended intercultural lesson study for teacher educators' professional learning.

This introductory chapter provides the background of this book and situates it in the current research literature and theoretical perspectives. An overview of the structure as well as a brief description of the chapters in each section is given.

Offering a rich, critical investigation of how technology can be used to strengthen and promote lesson study in both virtual and hybrid environments, this edited book presents insights into the numerous challenges as well as opportunities for supporting teachers’ and teacher educators’ professional learning in such a novel setting. Providing an international perspective, research in this book highlights on the one hand the necessity of exploring how the known theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches for researching on lesson study and effective characteristics of conducting lesson study can be adapted to the new environments. On the other hand, further analysis reveals the benefits of using various advanced technologies in lesson study, the new practice of professional development of teachers and teacher educators, and also documents related issues of conducting lesson study in such complex contexts. The chapters focus on online cross-cultural lesson study; the key aspects of conducting online lesson study and the effectiveness of it. Features of facilitation and the development of facilitators for online lesson study are explored, alongside the ways in which online lesson study can help address various problems of practice such as implementing equitable teaching, facilitating student interaction in virtual environments, and migration to remote teaching in STEM. This resourceful text provides needed support to both researchers and practitioners, from primary to higher education, with special attention to both teacher and student learning.

This concluding chapter synthesises the unique contributions of this book and discusses associated challenges in conducting online/hybrid LS. Finally, suggestions for further research in this field are considered.

This qualitative study seeks to establish a deeper understanding of how and what teachers and teacher educators learn collaboratively during the lesson study process in a Singapore primary school. We used the boundary theories to conceptualize this learning process and delineate the learning mechanisms to foster mutual learning between the teacher educators and teachers in the case school. It was found that the teachers’ practical concerns and the improvement proposals from the teacher educators were constantly being negotiated considering the perceived and received consequences, which drove the boundary actions that include both boundary making and boundary crossing to form a learning space for the participants. Findings from this study provide a practical perspective that explains the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of implementing lesson study and working with boundaries to support teacher professional learning.

This article provides a concrete illustration of how teachers in a primary school in Singapore discuss students’ learning in a lesson study cycle and grew professionally as a community. Specifically, we examined how collaboratively analysing students’ work serves as a useful practice for teachers to learn to work with diverse learners. The findings suggested that open discussions around students’ work helped teachers to reflect upon their unwarranted perceptions of their students and their teaching. The study provided insights into how teachers’ understandings of their students’ diverse backgrounds, as well as teachers’ understanding of subject content and pedagogy, developed as they participated in lesson study activities that were focused on analysing students’ work. Our findings found that lesson study provided the following affordances to foster such changes: (1) eliciting hypotheses in dialogue; (2) creating space for alternative perspectives; (3) collaboratively scrutinizing student learning evidence for follow-up teaching; and (4) identifying problems for further discussion. While the illustration of this case is uniquely Singaporean, implications include concerns about teacher professional learning and teaching for equity common to many other educational contexts.