ABSTRACT
Most of current Chinese teachers’ in-service learning takes place in two modes: listening to experts’ lectures, and sharing experiences among peers. How a boundary-crossing learning context can be created so as to inspire teachers’ deep reflection on their mindsets and change their routine behaviour remains a challenge. This paper explores how the teachers in a Chinese secondary school learned in a boundary-crossing lesson study with the support of outside scholars. Driven by the contradictions of value conflict between education for exams and education for student development, the teachers volunteered to participate in the project. Taking student group learning as the boundary object, the teachers retooled relevant theories and methods, improved teaching and learning, and generated new practical knowledge. The study identified four mechanisms that substantiated the teachers’ boundary-crossing learning: negotiation of meaning, relationship construction, perspective transformation, and hybridization of practice. The findings of this paper will benefit teachers, teacher researchers and educators as well as policy makers by providing experiences of an alternative approach for teacher learning.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the case school for inviting us to join the project, to the teachers who provided rich data and inspiration for the research, to Fuwei Wang and Ping Xie for their assistance in the project, and to Yanping Fang, Lynn Paine and the reviewers for the improvement of the manuscript.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Xiangming Chen
Xiangming Chen is a professor in Graduate School of Education, Peking University. She is also serving as distinguished researcher of Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education, East China Normal University. She got her Ph. D from Harvard University. Her research interests include teacher education, curriculum studies and research methodology. She is the author of many books and articles on qualitative research and teacher education.
Chao An
Chao An is assistant researcher in China Institute of Education & Social Development,Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. She got her Master degree from Peking University and her Ph. D from Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include sociology of education, teacher education and family education.