Investigating teacher adoption of authentic pedagogy through lesson study

ABSTRACT

In this article, we investigated the level of transfer of authentic pedagogy among 12 classroom teachers after participating in a three-year professional development project using scaffolded lesson study. We met with teachers for 2 weeks each summer and provided historian-led content sessions and teacher educator facilitated model pedagogy sessions featuring authentic pedagogy in the first week. In the second week, grade level teams, including classroom teachers, a teacher educator, and a historian, collaboratively developed lessons on a societal issue facing people of the time period being studied. During the academic year, we used the cyclical lesson study cycle of observing, critiquing, and revising the lesson twice before posting the final version of the lesson to a project website. Our findings indicate that 4 of the 12 research participants improved their scores on demanding rubrics of authentic pedagogy, significantly indicating strong potential for scaffolded lesson study as a professional development format that holds potential for lasting instructional change.

KEYWORDS:

• Analysis-of-practice
• authentic intellectual work
• authentic pedagogy
• lesson study
• professional development

Notes

1.  Interested readers can learn more about the PIH Network at http://www.pihnet.org.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History Grant [U215X090346].