How to make Lesson Study work in America and worldwide: A Japanese perspective on the onto-cultural basis of (teacher) education

Abstract

Lesson Study is a Japanese approach to teacher development borrowed by American researchers in the late 1990s seeking to break from top-down, “best practice” approaches. Two decades later, Lesson Study has gained a strong foothold in American policy circles. Seeking to contribute to the growing research base, this article looks deeper into the cultural obstacles obstructing effective practice in the American context. It suggests that the divergent onto-cultural basis of the Japanese context may be one major factor that helps make Lesson Study successful in Japan but challenging in other national contexts worldwide, perhaps most of all in the United States. The account is based on a meta-analysis of existing research on Lesson Study (1999–2015), combined with a reconceptualization of a rich ethnographic literature on compulsory schooling in Japan. This account frames the American borrowing of Japanese teacher developed practice in terms of educational borrowing and lending, suggesting that scholars need to return to the puzzle of culture, engage philosophically, and be open to ontological alterity.

Affordances and Constraints of Implementing Lesson Study for Teachers’ Professional Development: A Review

“…(Hart & Carriere, 2011). They end up unable to produce lessons like the original Japanese ones (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2017).…”

“…The more LS is localised, the more it deviates from its original version (Lee & Madden, 2019). Originally, LS focused on collaborative teacher-learning activities for the purpose of improving classroom instruction and content knowledge (Akiba & Wilkinson, 2016;Rappleye & Komatsu, 2017). Currently, in the USA, LS is used not only to improve classroom instruction, but also to improve leadership skills (Lee & Madden, 2019).…”

“…Since many LS studies are in mathematics and science subjects, teachers have developed a belief that LS is for science subjects only (Sims & Walsh, 2009). According to Rappleye and Komatsu (2017), if the misconceptions are not cleared, there is a danger of failing to harness the potentials of LS in impacting teachers' knowledge of the subject matter and pedagogical skills in all disciplines of learning.…”

Is exam hell the cause of high academic achievement in East Asia? The case of Japan and the case for transcending stereotypes

“…And most recently, popular authors like British teacher Lucy Crehan (2016), who took time to visit the region, concluded that stereotypes she once subscribed to were false: ‘Our stereotypes about Asian education systems are misinformed; they are not all exam hellhole, devoid of joy and deep learning and nor are they all the same’ (p. 266). Our quantitative, longitudinal analyses further support these earlier efforts and contribute to (re)opening the space to think deeply about the cause of high performance of East Asian students (see also Francis & Archer, ; Jerrim, ; Komatsu & Rappleye, ; Rappleye & Komatsu, ). We hope that these deeper, more thoughtful analyses will eventually replace the superficial popular and political debate, which remains stalled at the level of scandalisation or caricature (Takayama, ), or sometimes ill‐fated attempts to borrow structural elements from East Asia (e.g.…”

Statistics Learning Improvement: The power of lesson study

“…Some changes related to the way the teacher deliveries the materials or the selected materials or media or activities given can be done if needed. The cycle will continue until the goal of learning is achieved [4]. Teachers commonly starts their lesson study process by setting an objective for their students that they want to address through their instruction [5].…”