Using Japanese Curriculum Materials to Support Lesson Study Outside Japan : toward Coherent Curriculum

Abstract

Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) has spread outside Japan in the last decade, providing opportunities to see how lesson study fares in countries where the instructional practices and curriculum materials differ from those in Japan. This study reports an elementary mathematics lesson study cycle from the United States. To investigate the nature of the support for teachers’ learning during the curriculum study (“kyouzai kenkyuu”) phase of lesson study, we first compared a U.S. and Japanese teacher’s manual in their treatment of area of quadrilaterals. The coding scheme captured features hypothesized to influence teachers’ learning from curriculum including information on student thinking, learning trajectory and rationale for pedagogical decisions (Ball & Cohen, 1996). While the U.S. teacher’s manual provided more correct student answers and more often suggested adaptations for particular categories of students (e.g., English-language learners), the Japanese manual provided more varied individual student responses and more rationale for pedagogical choices. We provided the Japanese curriculum and teacher’s manual to a U.S. lesson group and observed them during lesson study; U.S. teachers found some Japanese curriculum features useful (e.g., student thinking) and other features challenging (e.g., focus on a single problem). A comparison of the U.S. teachers’ preand post- lesson study cycle lesson plans suggested that the teachers more thoroughly anticipated student thinking after working with the Japanese textbooks and teacher’s manuals. We suggest that kyouzai kenkyuu on a welldesigned teacher’s manual may enable “coherent curriculum” at the policy level to be enacted in the classroom.