Culturally crafted Lesson Study to improve teachers' professional development in mathematics: a case study in Italian secondary school

Abstract

This paper describes a Lesson Study in which in-service mathematics secondary-school teachers, collaborating with researchers, involve grade 10 students in tessellation problems. The data are collected by an experiment carried out in the context of the “Liceo Matematico” project, with three volunteer teachers. The experiment goal was to craft a collaborative design of the research lesson between teachers and researchers. The research aim of the paper is to examine the use of Lesson Study in the institutional and cultural context of Italian secondary school with the use of Cultural Transposition as a theoretical framework. The research is qualitative with idiographic aims, based on video research. The educational aim of the research is to provide a solid basis for a revamped in-service teacher education first in the context of the project, then in curricular context. Semiotic mediation is used to provide, within Lesson Study, the conceptual framework for teachers and researchers collaborative design of the research lesson. The results show that Lesson Study, as a foreign practice, is an opportunity for teachers to confront their teaching practices, to enrich their professional development, resulting in more awareness on their didactical action in and outside the classroom.

Theoretical Perspectives on Studying Mathematics Teacher Collaboration

“…Many papers use or develop theoretical constructs to better understand teacher collaboration. For examples, Capone et al (2020) utilise multiple theoretical perspectives (Semiosphere, Semiotic mediation, Boundary objects) to advance a multifaceted understanding on Lesson Study (LS) in the Italian context. Pepin and Gueudet (2020) discuss how the Documentational Approach to Didactics (DAD), a theoretical perspective which focuses on resources used and/or developed in teachers' work, allows us to understand the professional learning of teachers (in teacher collaboration) in terms of schemes.…”

“…In terms of combining multiple theories, Capone et al (2020) explored the possibilities of combining theoretical frameworks in order to understand mathematics teachers' PD, in particular LS in the Italian context. This paper is reminiscent of Skott's (2020) paper, which provides a theoretical perspective to analyse the implementation or adaptation of LS in a specific cultural context outside East Asia.…”

“…A boundary object is an object that lies at the intersection of several social worlds facilitating communication between them (Star, 2010). Capone et al (2020) show how LS helped the boundary crossing of the prospective teachers towards the practicing teaching community. A specificity of their study is that it was carried out explicitly from the perspective of networking theories.…”

“…2.3 (Otaki et al, 2020). Still, two further papers that present LS as teacher development contexts are White (2020), based on the notion of Professional Learning Community, and Capone et al (2020), who present several theoretical frameworks. In these papers, LS was regarded as a specific form or model of teacher professional development and not as a particular theory to study mathematics teacher collaboration.…”