Describing Lesson Study Designed for Improvement of Mathematics Teachers' Knowledge of Student Thinking

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explain the process of lesson study designed for improving the mathematics teachers' knowledge of student thinking and to examine its effectiveness in terms of the teaching process and the teachers' professional development. The lesson study composed of three cycles was carried out with three mathematics teachers. Each cycle comprised of five stages. The data were collected from the interviews, the lesson observations, the field notes and the reflective diaries. The interviews were conducted with teachers, the teachers' lessons were observed by the researchers, the field notes were taken by the researchers and the reflective diaries were written by the teachers after each cycles. The data were examined by considering knowledge of student thinking in a detailed way. The teachers' awareness of knowledge of student thinking got increased by means of the lesson study model. They came to consider the students' thinking in their lessons and to question the underlying reasons of their ideas.

A systematic review of transparency in Lesson Study research: how do we report on the observation and reflection stages?

“…In addition, all 18 articles approached the step of documentation differently. Approaches included, among others, reflective diaries or journals kept by teachers (Özaltun Çelik and Bukova Güzel, 2018;Calleja and Formosa, 2020), a specific template for note taking (Lee and Tan, 2020), meeting calendars (Kanellopoulou and Darra, 2018a), a report prepared by either the whole LS group (Özdemir, 2019) or a designated group member (Chua, 2019), as well as teachers' individual documentation of the process in an online space . This variety of ways in which LS groups document and mobilize their learning demonstrates that the research community cannot and should not presume that there is a standard process of documenting teachers' learnings in LS that requires no further communication in research articles.…”