Refocusing on Kyozai Kenykuu: Noticing Critical Aspects of a Mathematics Lesson

• In Event: Lesson Study Variation Across Contexts

Abstract

A major reason why teachers fail to learn from the processes of lesson study is the failure to engage adequately in kyozai kenykuu—the investigation of instructional materials—which is a critical process in Lesson Study (Yoshida & Jackson, 2011). In particular, teachers have to pay particular attention to details pertaining to mathematical concepts, students’ learning difficulties, and the connections between their teaching approaches and students’ thinking (Lee & Choy, 2017; Takahashi & McDougal, 2016). This selective attention to instructional details, or what researchers termed as teacher noticing (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011) is critical for improving teaching practices. Teacher noticing can be conceptualized as a form of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994), which comprises three inter-connected skills—attending to, interpreting, and deciding to respond (Jacobs, Lamb, Philipp, & Schappelle, 2011)—in an instructional context. Choy, Thomas, and Yoon (2017) highlight that not all noticing is productive for making pedagogical decisions that promote mathematical thinking. Moreover, noticing students’ thinking about mathematical concepts require much effort and can be challenging even for experienced teachers (Lee & Choy, 2017). For teachers to engage in productive noticing, they need to focus on specific instructional details and mediate their decisions through pedagogical reasoning (Choy, 2015). In this presentation, we describe how we bring in the notion of teacher noticing into the lesson study cycle, focusing on what, and how a group of mathematics teachers noticed as they planned and implement a lesson on fraction of a set. The mathematics teachers were participants of a larger study on Lesson Study for Learning Community in a primary school in Singapore. Data were collected from video and audio recordings of discussion sessions and research lesson, field notes, and artifacts generated during the lesson study cycle. After data condensation, we examined the data using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to highlight the critical aspects of a lesson that were noticed by the teachers. Findings suggest teachers tend to focus more on the actual teaching strategies or methods, and often sidelined the more subtle but important aspects of mathematics teaching and learning. For example, the teachers did not initially discern the subtle differences between fraction of a discrete set of objects and fraction of a continuous measure. Instead, they focused on the surface features of the tasks and emphasized the need to incorporate real-world contexts into the task. Teachers’ difficulty to notice key aspects of mathematics, students’ learning, and the connections to the task design has important implications for how we, as lesson study facilitators or knowledgeable other, support teachers to learn from the processes of lesson study. Consequently, we suggest some adaptations and guiding questions for teachers as they refocus on a deeper implementation of kyozai kenykuu.

Authors

• Ban Heng Choy, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education

• Jason Lai, National Institute of Education, Singapore

• Christine K.E. Lee, Nanyang Technological University

• Betsy Ng, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education

• Rachel Goh, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education