Lesson Study East and West: Identifying Some Key Issues

Citation

Dr Pádraig Hogan (2015), "Lesson Study East and West: Identifying Some Key Issues", International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 178-181. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLLS-01-2015-0004

Lesson study and learning study continue to grow internationally as a particularly promising kind of professional development for teachers. This growth is matched by a major rise in research interest in lesson study in European countries, adding to an already established scholarship in the field in Eastern Asia. Two recently published books capture the energetic tenor of these developments and provide a range of illuminating insights into how central lesson study can be in promoting teaching as a creative practice in its own right. The first book is Lesson Study: Professional Learning for Our Time, edited by Peter Dudley. This collection provides an illuminating focus of the rise of lesson study in England, with chapters also on developments in Japan and on recent international research findings on lesson study. The second book is Realising Learning : Teachers’ Professional Development through Lesson and Learning Study, edited by Keith Wood and Saratha Sithamparam. As its Preface says, this collection “is an attempt to go deeper into the theory and practice of lesson and learning study” and to make an assessment of what has been accomplished through its international rise.

I have been asked by John Elliott to peruse both books and identify some issues that are worthy of further exploration and debate in advancing the research standing of lesson study and learning study. I’m happy to accept the invitation, but in doing so I should begin by disclosing how my own view of lesson study has changed. When I first came across Japanese lesson study many years ago I tended to view it as something more technical than creative: a device for improving the effectiveness of a curriculum prescribed from above which teachers were then called on to implement, or “deliver”. That view would place lesson study at the opposite end of the spectrum from the “teacher-as –researcher” perspective associated with Lawrence Stenhouse, and indeed with Elliott himself. It would similarly distance it from the “reflective practitioner” literature associated with Donald Schön, Stephen Brookfield and others. As will become clear from the remarks offered below, however, many of the contributions to these two edited collections place both lesson study and learning study in a rich philosophical vein. For example there are strong resonances, albeit more implicit than explicit, with some central themes in the work of Dewey. More intriguingly perhaps, there are discernible signs here of a long-eclipsed orientation for educational thought and practice that is genuinely Socratic in origin.

I cannot do justice here to the 16 contributed papers to these two valuable volumes. More modestly perhaps I can, in the five issues I raise below, help to make explicit the distinctiveness and warrant of a richly philosophical approach to educational thought and action. Far from seeking a last word on any of the points raised, these points themselves are an invitation to further exploration along hopefully profitable paths.

Peter Dudley’s introductory essay in Lesson Study: Professional Learning for Our Time (Dudley, Ed.) makes a well-argued case for lesson study and can provide teachers with deep insights into students’ learning and can significantly enhance teachers’ pedagogical capacities. A similar case, but this time for learning study is made in Keith Wood’s opening essay in Realising Learning : Teachers’ Professional Development through Lesson and Learning Study (Wood and Sithamparam, Eds). Learning study is more to the fore than lesson study in Realising Learning and accordingly this book deals more prominently with the role and status of pedagogical theory. I recognise the scholarly intentions underlying this concern with theory, yet I’m somewhat uneasy about it. I think it might be launching educational research on a restricted path of discovery; a path which could curb rather than cultivate the artistic possibilities that learning study could furnish for educational thought and practice.

Learning study gives a particular importance to a form of theory called “variation theory”. This was developed in Sweden by Ference Marton and refined and applied to pedagogical practice in Hong Kong by Lo Mun Ling. Central to variation theory, Wood explains, are three kinds of variation:

V1: variation in terms of students’ ways of experiencing the object of learning;

V2: variation in teachers’ ways of preparing to teach the object of learning; and

V3: variation as a pedagogical tool (p. 12).

Secondly, equally central to variation theory is a concern with the “object of learning” to be taught, from which critical features have to be identified by teachers working as a team in planning a lesson (pp. 7-9).

The evaluation studies carried out on Learning Study in Hong Kong (reported for instance in Elliott’s contribution, pp. 148-167, of Realising Learning) underline its beneficial effects, and highlight the possibilities it offers for providing greater professional scope to teachers. This is good news and it echoes the kind of news reported by Peter Dudley and co-contributors in the UK context in Lesson Study: Professional Learning for Our Time.

Keeping in mind this background of positive research findings there are many interesting points for discussion also raised by this research, not least the role and status of theory, already referred to briefly above. I’ve selected five such points below with some preliminary comments on each.

(1) Variation theory

The three kinds of variation seem to offer a more refined and analytical approach qto planning, and to that extent betoken an advance for learning study over lesson study. Each of the three kinds of variation would seem to include a very wide diversity, however. To what extent can that diversity be made more tractable for teaching purposes by this threefold distinction? Probably to a large extent if the teacher’s concern is chiefly with the cognitive contents of learning. The evidence presented from Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore would seem to support this. But what if the teacher’s concerns are more inclusive? What if high quality learning is to be understood not only in terms of advances in cognitive achievements, but also in terms of significant shifts in students’ self-understanding and emergent sense of personal identity. Such shifts are active in all learning, formal and informal, whether acknowledged or not. I’ll comment further on this in referring to Dewey below.

(2) Object of learning

Central in many of the papers that deal with learning study is the notion of “object of learning” and the identification of critical features of such objects. Yet the term “object of learning” remains a bit abstract. Reading through the various contributions of both books one finds brief references to practical examples, but not enough to provide the reader with a clear concept; not enough, that is, to distinguish object of learning from say, learning intention, or subject of study, or learning aims. To illustrate the meaning and benefits of “object of study” it would be helpful to read a summary account of a lesson in geography, or science, or English that was taught while availing of variation theory and that was taught without availing of variation theory. Highlighting the contrasts might thus clarify what concrete differences a learning study approach makes; i.e. in practices of teaching and learning

(3) Advances in achievement – what is included and what isn’t?

In the versions of lesson study and learning study presented in the two books there is a consistent focus on student performance, as evaluated by measured achievements. In Lo Mun Ling’s contribution (Wood and Sithamparam collection) there is substantial evidence presented of significant advances in cognitive achievements on the part of students. The same is true of Kim-Eng Lee’s and Lim-Ratnan’s account of lesson study in Singapore’s schools. Similarly, in the papers in the Dudley collection there is recurring evidence of advances in students’ performance. There is also reference in Dudley’s own contributions to something that is arguably more inclusive: to improvements in students’ learning. I would like to see more on this. There would seem to be no reason in principal why essentially qualitative things such as enduring enhancements in student’s attitudes toward learning and in their practices of learning, couldn’t be included in lesson study and learning study, as well as the enhancements in cognitive achievements that are already included. This would place lesson study and learning study more strongly in a context of educational research, properly so-called; as distinct from a narrower context of effectiveness of learning, or “school effectiveness”.

(4) Progress made by lesson study in the UK and some lacunae in the research

In the collection by Peter Dudley et al. there are impressive accounts of the benefits brought by lesson study in England. The reports from the school principals (Jim O’Shea and Sue Teague) and from the school support officers (Gill Jordan and Jean Lang) are encouraging and convincing. The actual reasons for the success seem to be more implicit than explicit however, apart from Dudley’s own researches. In this connection XU and Pedder speak approvingly of Dudley’s work (p. 46) but they also express some disappointment at the small number of studies of “ the processes through which LS enables teachers to learn”. Could this be because most of the LLS research that is cited in both books seems methodologically predisposed to attend to learning behaviours rather than to learning experiences? The enthusiastic comments from school leaders and teacher are especially revealing in this connection. They are a testament to the fact that they have had professionally enriching experiences with LS. Their sense of professional identity has been enhanced, even transformed. Some deeply rooted assumptions and attitudes have been made explicit and questioned in co-operative settings of constructive criticism. This brings together lesson study and action in a properly Socratic kind of learning environment for the participant teachers. This is all to the good. I don’t know to what extent this more inclusive and fertile kind of learning environment has traditionally been a feature of lesson study, or more recently of learning study. If it was a recognised feature of both, I think the learning processes of the teachers would unavoidably be more to the fore. I also think that there might be less concern with theory, or with its supposed importance in educational research, and more concern with incisive insights that reveal the distinctiveness of educational thought and practice, properly so called.

(5) How learning itself is understood

The understandings of learning underlying most of the accounts in both books seem to be confined to the formal contents of learning; i.e. to matters that are chiefly cognitive. None of the papers seem to take account of collateral learning – at least not in any explicit way. A question I ask myself here is “shouldn’t a phenomenography of learning pick up something as important as collateral learning?” I haven’t come across the term phenomenography before now, and I’m wondering if it resembles phenomenology in any sense associated with Husserl in philosophy or with Alfred Schütz in the social sciences. May be not. In any case the fundamental importance of collateral learning has been memorably highlighted by Dewey. It’s worth quoting Dewey himself on this:

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of the desire to go on learning (Experience and Education, p. 48).

That attitude of “the desire to go on learning” is continually evident in the most positive ways in the remarks of teachers and school leaders reported in the articles in both books. By contrast, these articles are largely silent on the question of how attitudes toward learning change and develop among the pupils who were the beneficiaries of the LS initiatives. Much done, and an abundance to do. Here is a field that beckons the attentions of a growing international community of researchers, which has a strong family resemblance to action research, and which is well positioned to dissolve the vexed rift between “theory and practice” that has all too often arrested the coming of age of educational research itself.