Lesson Study and Pedagogic Literacy in Initial Teacher Education: Challenging Reductive Models

ABSTRACT:

This paper argues that teacher learning is not reducible to lists of ‘performative’ standards. Funded by the Society for Educational Studies, we used ‘lesson study’ as a vehicle to develop new teacher expertise, following which we concluded that conceptualising ‘learning to teach’ as acquisition of standards is insufficient for understanding the process of teacher growth. We propose an alternative holistic vision.

Keywords:

• initial teacher education
• lesson study
• collaborative practice
• pedagogic literacy

7. Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to many student–teachers and mentors who participated in the study. We are also very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful comments on the first draft of the paper.

8. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Society for Educational Studies for funding the lesson study projects.