Lee, Christine Kim-eng

The urgency of teaching diverse learners is aptly demonstrated in many parts of the world as the ethnic, racial, class, and linguistic diversity grows rapidly. Such diversity not only brings about opportunities for creative teaching, but also challenges for ensuring educational equity and providing high-quality teaching for all students from diverse backgrounds, especially those presently underserved by the educational system (Buehl, & Beck, 2014; Civitillo, Juang, & Schachner, 2018). Researchers have found that teachers prepared for working with students from diverse cultural backgrounds need to embrace beliefs that recognize the strengths of cultural diversity (Anagnostopoulos, 2006; Banks et al., 2005; Fives & Buehl, 2014; Gay, 2010). Thus, exploring and challenging teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity should constitute a major objective in teacher professional learning. However, only a few studies have examined how in-service teachers’ beliefs are enacted and shaped in professional learning community practices (Little, 2003; Tam, 2015; Turner, 2011), and focused even less on teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity (Pang, 2005; Sleeter, 1992). There are a few studies examining teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity in Singapore, and found that Singaporean teachers are influenced by prevailing political ideologies, and have ambiguous perceptions towards students from less advantaged backgrounds (Anderson, 2015; Alviar-Martin & Ho, 2011; Dixon & Liang, 2009; Ho & Alviar-Martin, 2010; Ho et al., 2014; Lim & Tan, 2018). However, these studies discussed teachers’ individual perceptions of disadvantaged learners without further exploring how these perceptions are mediated by influences from professional development practices, where teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity issues are in (inter)action as ideas emerge, clash, change, and (dis)agree with each other when teachers work together.

This qualitative study seeks to establish a deeper understanding of how and what teachers and teacher educators learn collaboratively during the lesson study process in a Singapore primary school. We used the boundary theories to conceptualize this learning process and delineate the learning mechanisms to foster mutual learning between the teacher educators and teachers in the case school. It was found that the teachers’ practical concerns and the improvement proposals from the teacher educators were constantly being negotiated considering the perceived and received consequences, which drove the boundary actions that include both boundary making and boundary crossing to form a learning space for the participants. Findings from this study provide a practical perspective that explains the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of implementing lesson study and working with boundaries to support teacher professional learning.

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.

Kyouzai kenkyuu, or the “study of materials for teaching”, is a critical yet often neglected phase in lesson study adopted in countries beyond Japan. In this phase, teachers carefully examine curriculum documents, textbooks, teaching and learning materials, and subject matter and read relevant research to inform the development of a unit within which is embedded the research lesson. However, teachers often fail to engage adequately in kyouzai kenkyuu. Given its importance, it is crucial for teachers to understand the essence of kyouzai kenkyuu and conduct this phase of lesson study beyond a superficial level. In this chapter, we will explain the main inquiry processes involved in kyouzai kenkyuu, provide some guidelines for lesson study practitioners, and illustrate these ideas using two snapshots of practice from our work with teachers.