Refining teaching expertise through analysing students’ work: a case of elementary mathematics teacher professional learning during lesson study in Singapore

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher learning
• teaching expertise
• analyse students’ work
• lesson study

Acknowledgments

This study was funded by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 18/15 JH) and administered by National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Singapore MOE and NIE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Education, Singapore [OER 18/15 JH].