Decoding Lesson Study: Narratives From Assistant Language Teachers in Japan

Introduction

In Japan, lesson study is in the air. My initial experience with lesson study (LS) was in 1999, the same year that Stigler and Hiebert (1999) shed light on the practice to an international audience, but I experienced it with boots on the ground rather than through an academic lens. I participated in lesson study several times as a native-English speaking Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) from Canada in the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. LS was one more thing that kept my Japanese colleagues working late at school. It had existed for roughly one hundred years (Nakatome, 1984) and had become a formality, justified by its long history. Teachers had to suffer through LS because that is the way it had always been. It is in the air.

It was years later that I first encountered lesson study in higher education context. It had been gaining ground in the United States and other countries for five to ten years, and I had moved on from the JET Program to a faculty position at a teacher’s college, still in Japan. Over tea at an international conference on education, an American participant was enthusiastically extolling the virtues of LS, and I had to interrupt, “Sorry, what’s lesson study?” Coming from a long-term resident of Japan involved in teacher education, it must have been a particularly odd question. As soon as it had surfaced, I realized: “Oh… KENKYU JUGYO! All the fuss is about that!?”

LS is conducted at elementary through high schools across Japan in all content areas, but other countries have often focused on it in the context of math lessons, rather than English or second language learning. It had not been on my radar, but since I had become involved in teacher education, that would have to change. LS is a major aspect of professional development for teachers in Japan (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).

In LS, teachers plan and deliver a lesson to their students, while their peers or a wider audience observes. Following the lesson, a reflection meeting is held in which the observers and teachers comment on the lesson. It is conducted at the school, prefectural, and even national levels, and within this broad framework, LS may take many forms. Not only has it become common in developed countries like the U.S. and Europe, but Japan has also been exporting the concept to developing countries in Africa and other regions through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA, n.d.). Likewise, there is a growing body of literature on LS, as outlined in Lewis et al. (2019), and it has recently been the focus of study for graduate students at my institution. My starting point, however, was bleak. Adding to the excessive workload that Japanese teachers face (Lee, 2022; Osaki, 2022; Yamamoto, 2023), LS appears to be just another labor intensive, performative burden on teachers.

This research stems from the gap between my initial subjective opinion of LS, and the positive buzz surrounding it, which has become impossible to overlook. There are three positions on which this chapter is based. First, starting with a review of the literature, the chapter follows my own education on LS. As an LS skeptic, some of my early readings were less than convincing. However, as it has gained momentum outside of Japan, the literature on LS has become persuasive. Within the last decade, various theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand the mechanisms of teacher-learning, positive outcomes have been increasingly well-documented, and tools have been developed to guide implementation of LS and to conduct research.