Developing Teachers' Expertise in Mathematics Instruction as Deliberate Practice Through Chinese Lesson Study

• In Event: 56.080 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 56.080-6 - Developing Teacher Leadership and Expertise Through Lesson Study and Action Research: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Abstract

In the past decade studies have documented the influences of lesson study on teaching, teacher learning and student achievement (Hart, Alston & Murata, 2011; Leiws & Hurd, 2011; Lewis & Perry, 2015). In recent years Chinese lesson study has incorporated existing elements of lesson study and designed experiment to innovate its approaches and content rigor (Huang, Gong, & Han, 2016; Huang & Han, 2015). Investigating how Chinese lesson study contributes to mathematics learning will help better understand the mechanism of Chinese lesson study. In this paper we drew on the theoretical lens of deliberate practice to explore how Chinese lesson study developed mathematics teachers’ expertise on the topic of division with fractions.
The research on expert performance in some professional fields such as chess, music and medicine, etc. (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993; Van Gog et al., 2005) pointed out that engagement in certain specific activities was an important factor that resulted in continued improvement and attainment of expert performance. These activities, developed for individuals to improve and repeatedly receiving feedback from experts, were defined as deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 1993). Researchers have investigated teacher learning and designed teacher education programs to promote teacher learning through the theoretical lens of deliberate practice (Han & Paine, 2010; Bronkhorst et al., 2013; Lampert et al, 2013).
In this paper we analyzed two mathematics teachers’ learning via the lens of deliberate practice. Each of the two teachers conducted six research lessons in their respective lesson study groups at an elementary school of China. The lesson study activities were theory-driven, which asked the teachers to employ the theories of learning trajectory (Clements & Sarama, 2004) and teaching with variation (Gu, Huang, & Marton, 2004) to design their lessons. The data sources of the study included three videotaped research lessons, three debriefing meetings, audiotaped interviews with participant teachers and students, lesson plans, student classroom worksheets, student quiz, and the participant teachers’ reflection journals from the two groups.
Reading through each set of the data sources from two lesson study groups, we drew on the four characteristics of deliberate practice – repeated, with feedback, at a challenging level of difficulty, and rehearsal for making and correcting errors – to code the teachers’ activities into categories. We further triangulated our analysis with other data such as interviews with the students in order to seek any emerging themes regarding deliberate activities.
The preliminary results showed substantial improvement of teaching through effectively implementing tasks that were aligned with learning trajectory and variation theory. Conducting lesson study as deliberate practice provided teachers opportunities to repeatedly investigate core instruction activities such as selecting and sequencing mathematical tasks, using visual representations strategically, and designing approaches to elicit multiple ways of solving problems. The study further suggested the importance of identifying core aspects of designing representative tasks of mathematics teaching to develop teachers’ expertise. It also revealed that such expertise could be further enhanced by repeated enactment and experts’ input throughout the lesson study cycles.

Authors

• Xue Han, Dominican University

• Rongjin Huang, Middle Tennessee State University