Reorienting teaching standards: learning from lesson study

Abstract

Teaching standards are regularly described as a mechanism for improving the status of the teaching profession and as a means to develop high-quality teachers. Less attention has been paid to the difficulties of fostering professional learning when externally produced standards are imposed on teachers. This paper outlines how lesson study can inform the use of teaching standards to shift the focus to centre on learning rather than teaching to richly inform national and international views on the use of teaching standards. More specifically, it explores how lesson study was a powerful process that developed a lived understanding of teaching standards and fostered two significant discursive shifts in teacher understanding of standards: from individual to collegial activity; and secondly from statements of teaching to centring the focus on processes of learning.

Keywords:

• lesson study
• community of practice
• professional learning
• professional teaching standards
• teacher learning

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the support of colleagues who provided valuable feedback in the development of this paper.

Notes

1. In my view, a deficiency of standard lesson study processes is that they do not explicitly seek to identify and incorporate prior research evidence relevant to the goals of the lesson and use this evidence in planning.