Anthony Clarke

Lesson study, as one part of teaching research in China and an important form of teacher professional development, attracts worldwide attention. However, how teacher learning happens in this context is less well explored. This chapter unveils a unique form of lesson study, Tong Ke Yi Gou (TKYG, ‘deliberate practice with variations’), and explores how teacher learning is realised with its iterative process of enquiry. It traces the brief history of teaching research, a main form of teacher professional development in China, and then elaborates on three forms of TKYG with rich connotations of curriculum-enactment, teaching expertise, and understanding learning, and arrives at the conclusion that Tong Ke Yi Gou is a localised form of teacher enquiry. This outcome sheds light on TKYG's significance to teachers' professional development, traditions of teaching research in China, and current debates and discussions about teacher enquiry worldwide.

Teacher education programmes are embedded in both higher and K-12 education contexts. This study explores how collective teacher agency is developed and manifested within two online teacher education courses in a Canadian university and a Chinese university, respectively, under the Covid-19 pandemic context. Employing a digital ethnographic approach, this study reveals that: (1) the structural changes caused by the pandemic create common goals for collective teacher agency to develop; (2) collective teacher agency is motivated by caring for student well-being and honing of teaching skills; and (3) the asynchronous course structure hindered Chinese student teachers’ collective efforts to improve teaching but afforded the Canadian group greater collective agency in connecting with their schools. Importantly, this study highlights the role of emotions in facilitating collective agency and argues that emotions are an integral but often overlooked part of teacher agency.

This study describes the practicum-mentors’ identity in a teacher education context based on Dialogical Self Theory (DST) and the related ‘position’ and ‘I-position’ concepts. Participants were 48 Spanish and Canadian primary and secondary teachers who participated via an online written survey. The data were analysed using qualitative and quantitative procedures. Findings show a comprehensive description of nine types of positions and twenty types of I-positions. Based on these categories, three clusters of practicum-mentors, which represent three different ways of being a mentor, were identified: (1) a collaborative partner focused on student-teacher (ST) professional development, including the design, and teaching of ST skills acquisition; (2) a collaborative partner focused on design, teaching, and assessment of ST skills acquisition, and (3) a coaching partner focused on teaching and individualised ST learning. The findings can promote closer collaboration between universities and schools concerning the design of more relevant professional development for mentors based on the three identified ways of being a mentor.

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the perception and experience of ten new faculty member participants in paired teaching. Along with providing evidence for paired teaching as an avenue for professional development in higher education, the study provides experiential narratives of paired teaching relationships as an illustration of the process. Key outcomes of the study include: the value of peer-to-peer engagement for prompting reflection on practice and facilitation of instructor use of active learning approaches within the classroom.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to better understand the work of mentors or cooperating teachers (CTs) in Spain and Thailand, by comparing how mentors in both contexts conceive of their work in teacher education.Design/methodology/approach: A comparative study based on a crossnational research (CNR) approach was used. An internationally validated instrument, the Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI), was given to 171 Spanish and 170 Thai CTs, and an analysis usingttests and constant comparative methods was conducted.Findings: The main results indicate that the Spanish cohort reported being significantly more challenged than their Thai counterparts in working with preservice teachers (PSTs). Both groups indicated a similar degree of motivation. The comparative analysis revealed that the Thai CTs emphasized the importance of ethics in teaching and being a role model for PSTs, whereas the Spanish CTs emphasized the need for strong interpersonal relationships as being central to successful mentoring.Research limitations/implications: Understanding mentors' challenges and motivations can form the basis for reflecting upon the essential components of teacher preparation in both contexts. Furthermore, comparative cross-context analyses, as demonstrated in this paper, are vital for the identification of important differences that might otherwise remain invisible or unrecognized from a single-context perspective.Originality/value: The study is original in its focus in that it offers insights that help better understand attitudes and performance within and across contexts – in this case, a European and an Asian country – using a common metric, the MPI. This study serves as an exemplar for other comparison studies for countries of mentors.

This study examines how a cohort of 32 Chinese student teachers experience a 3-week Intensive Study Abroad Programme in Canada, which focused on facilitating understanding of teaching and learning from an international perspective. Research findings underscore the effectiveness of a context responsive approach to cross-cultural teaching and learning that places emphasis upon modelling and deliberate explication of teaching practice, experiential learning and dialogic reflection.

Agency and structure postulate a dialectic relationship: agents’ actions shape and are shaped by social structure in a spiral and dynamic manner. Empirical studies in pre-collegiate science education contexts, however, tend to focus on individual’s positionality instead of the engagement between agency and structure. This paper first charts the theoretical and methodological terrains of agency and structure from sociological, critical/post-structural, and psychological perspectives. It then reviews empirical studies on the agency-structure dialectic in pre-collegiate science education with a focus on their theoretical frameworks (agency), research contexts (structure), and related methods and methodologies. The reviewed studies are divided into four categories: teacher agency, teacher-and-student agency, student agency, and administrator agency. The results reveal how the agency-structure dialectic is taken up and studied in science education and how the notions of culture and language provide the possibility for hybrid perspectives of agency. We argue that the notion of emergence, based on the engagement within and among individual and collective agencies and structures, is the key to move beyond the current agency-structure dialectic in science education.

This study examines a group of teachers’ moral agency in the context of China’s curriculum reform. While the reform possesses neo-liberal features such as decentralisation and education for global competitiveness, it also attempts to undermine the long-standing influence of exam-oriented education in China. Employing ethnographic approaches, the results indicate that teachers’ moral agency within this context has three specific foci: (1) directing students to become moral people; (2) dedication to teaching; and (3) developing knowledge for and about teaching. Although the study acknowledges that external accountabilities do constrain teachers’ autonomy, teachers’ moral agency is shaped and enabled by engagement with students and teachers still have a say in what is educationally desirable.