Impact of Lesson Study and Fractions Resources on Instruction and Student Learning

Charting the Professional Development Journey of Irish Primary Teachers as They Engage in Lesson Study

“…Over eight weeks, each LS group collaborated to plan and implement a research lesson that addressed their identified problem of practice [2,18,20]. Consequently, this LS initiative met the criteria for effective PD as it was directly relevant to teachers, focused on children's learning, modelled preferred instructional practices in the live research lessons, promoted active learning and teacher inquiry, fostered collective participation in a professional learning community and focused on prolonged engagement [3][4][5]35]. Through this LS engagement, teachers gained their first experience of the PD model envisaged within Irish policy [8,10].…”

“…National LS experts could play an important role in informing and supporting such capacity building. Such liaisons could also promote the creation of research-informed LS resources, e.g., LS toolkits [30,34,35,42]. The creation of toolkits that include quality LS and content-specific resource kits could play a critical role in promoting the fidelity of LS implementation that includes critical features in efforts to scale up LS within the Irish context [25,33,42].…”

“…An identified shortcoming of LS is that it has been researched 'mainly through smallscale, qualitative studies by investigators directly involved in Lesson Study implementation' [34] (p. 265). Two recent studies, however, that use randomised controlled trials have measured the efficacy of LS [34,35]. The findings evidence the benefits of LS that incorporate research-informed resource kits.…”

“…The findings evidence the benefits of LS that incorporate research-informed resource kits. More specifically, Lewis and Perry's (2017) [34] study reported statistically significantly greater improvement in both educator and student fraction knowledge under conditions where both LS and fraction resource kits were used, whereas Schoen et al's (2023) [35] study revealed a statistically significant positive effect on classroom instruction among participants with access to fraction resource kits. These studies suggest the central role of quality resource kits in supporting LS implementation and their documented role in efforts to scale up LS within education systems.…”