School-Based Teaching Research and Lesson Case Study in Mediating the Second-Cycle Curriculum Reform in Shanghai

• In Event: Chinese Lesson Study: Theories, Practices, and Its Adaptation

Abstract

Emerging research on education reform in Shanghai for the last decade or so has either focused on broad contexts and trends of the second-cycle curriculum reform (Sun et al., 2016) or professional development (Paine & Fang, 2009) in response to the reform or detailed cases of teaching improvement to meet reform demand (Yang, 2009). Little attention has been paid to how schools, as institutions, have been made to respond to and enact the reform. This paper, through three detailed school cases, aims to understand the school’s distinctive responses to reform in terms of how they interpreted, enacted and sustained their reform efforts, and how research projects and lesson-case study (Wang & Gu, 2007), a consolidated form of Chinese lesson study, mediated significantly these efforts. Features of sustainable development are conceptualized in light of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of transparency in the mediating technology of a community of practice. Drawing on master’s thesis reports of school leaders (2010-2016), school research publications and lesson cases as secondary data sources, an instrumental multi-case research design was adopted to build detailed case narratives and tease out cross-case comparisons.

Building on unique strengths and legacies to solve school problems, the three schools responded and enacted the reform in unique ways: case one, a municipal key school, has focused on ‘three translations (of curriculum)’ involving all teaching research groups (TRGs) in specifying broad curriculum standards into concrete, actionable designs, testing and refining them through iterative cycles of lesson-case study, and systematically developing and refining student practice tasks with research projects, studying problems from and inform decision making for each translation. Case two, a district key school, has capitalized on its strong TRGs and used research projects and lesson-case study to unite teaching, research and professional development (PD) into a whole; and case three, a regular school, has aimed to build a structured PD system by stressing the reflection components of each cycle of lesson-case study, letting teachers struggle and learn in the district-level curriculum integration experiment, and nudging teachers into their own research projects with well-staged support. In all three cases, research projects are networked connecting municipal, district, school, and teachers in building a research climate. Lesson-case study turn designs into refined actions and teacher reflections through peer coaching.

This study yields insights into the inner workings of Shanghai’s recent curriculum reform. With strategic injection of research into the familiar institutional structures and organic cultural forms of collegiality, school innovations can be built on familiarity to create a sense of continuity, coherence and institutional identity so that teachers learn from doing with least disruption. The slow and steady work of sustaining innovations and reform goes beyond simple notions of scaling up and relies on building internal drive and institutional and teacher capacity for deep learning (Fullan, 2015) in responding to and doing reform.

Author

• Yanping Fang, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University