Linking Auto/ethnography and Lesson Study

It would be an inadequate position to be in if Lesson Study research did not hear and see the teachers and school leaders. This is because while it is fine to hear about the academics’ views it is not the same as ‘living’ the research. I must be clear in my argument here; I am not proposing that all educational research is invalid because it does not take into account the views or experiences of the primary teaching profession. I am proposing that some research can feel like it is not seeing a broad impression of education (i.e. focusing on a particular aspect of the complex world of teaching and learning such as a reading intervention programme) and as such research should be wary of drawing large scale conclusions across teaching. Similarly, I know that my research is contextual, and my story is only directly applicable to my school and my context. It may have wider resonance, and it may be useful to researchers looking at Lesson Study in a broader sense, but it would be unwise for me to draw conclusions from my work across Lesson Study in all schools.

My research into Lesson Study benefits from the multiplicity of my role. I have identified in Chapter 1 how it is important to hear different voices and by inhabiting different roles I hope I am able to take something from each perspective: my teacher identity, my leader identity and my researcher identity, to systematically research the impact Lesson Study has as a teacher learning tool. I want to open up the gaps in the research, currently summarised in

Dudley’s (2015) diagram Figure 1.2 and actually look into the ‘how’ of Lesson Study, so that I understand it better, but also so it is clearer as a teacher learning tool.

My concern with Lesson Study and the need to hear from teachers is two-fold. Firstly, deviant or failed Lesson Studies are not published and do not receive the consideration necessary to improve the method in the English school context, which means we do not know why Lesson Study groups do not succeed, meaning we cannot avoid the same potential pitfalls. Secondly, as mentioned above, the Lesson Study writing tends to be on how to conduct Lesson Study or on outcomes. Denzin (2011) talks about how this focus on the countable and the measurable is a challenge to the educational researcher as they protect the researcher from having to consider their own validity as their evidential approach linked to these measurable and countable outcomes allows them to believe that their work has had this impact and can be replicated elsewhere, when in reality the reader has no insight into the variables that occurred in the published study and as such the potential difficulties they might have, or the things they need to consider before embarking on Lesson Study research.

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Lesson Study definitely works – that’s what I feel I am being told. It might be all we need to do is get our teachers doing Lesson Study and then exam results will improve.

I have worries about this – it cannot be so simple – can it?

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This analysis based on evidential measures misses out the failures, the frustrations and the real learning that happens in a process. In many senses this means that Lesson Study literature is a victor’s history of research and to me that is unsettling. Yes, no one wants to suggest that their work is a failure, but something that is needed to be drawn from science is that researchers try to prove themselves wrong as part of their validation process (Clandinin

& Rosiek, 2007). As a school leader, I want to know how to best equip my teachers for their development, and while there seems to be a great deal of promise in Lesson Study, there is not enough information published on how it is successful or how to make it successful. I believe this is because there has been little consideration of the research into the undertaking of teacher-led development through Lesson Study, and even less focus on teacher voices in Lesson Study work.

I have established the need to consider more than the accounts looked at in the Lesson Study review above. My research requirements are thus two-fold: teachers’ voices and experience are taken into account and there is an appreciation of the broader sense of teaching and learning, thus going beyond Denzin’s (2011) warning of research’s focus on the measurable and countable. I will endeavour to provide a teacher’s, a head teacher’s and a researcher’s voice throughout my story so that I can understand how Lesson Study works as a teacher learning tool.

To do that I will use this section of the literature review to explore two aspects of the literature, both revisions of previous sections; firstly, I will look at teacher auto/ethnography, namely articles that involve at least one writer who is a current teacher, or recent teacher. Secondly, I will look at teacher writing on Lesson Study, the majority of which will be online writing and may not conform to academic standards, in terms of referencing or structure.

2.9 Teacher written research on Lesson Study

Above I have discussed the literature on Lesson Study and its current limitations. When I refined this lens further and looked at examples of teacher written reviews of Lesson Study, literature that is mostly published on websites and included in blogs, I noticed two trends. Firstly, despite the intentions of Lesson Study to enable practice to be more evidence informed, writings by teachers seemed to be largely devoid of citations or indication that they

have engaged in any reading around their work. Secondly, while the teachers have indicated summaries of their learning these are not framed in research or how they inform research further, either in support or opposition.

Before I discuss this research, I should note that a lot of work in Lesson Study is not recorded and, as such, it is difficult to say that trends are prevalent throughout teachers’ writing on Lesson Study and blogs do not tend to use citations opting for a more diarised sentiment.

I think this is an area neglected in the writing about education. Teachers do not regularly, in my experience, reach beyond the teacher, the colleague, the trainer to seek out or understand contexts more widely, and as such do not always engage in educational research. The reasons for this could be that educational research is not their dominant culture, as I have suggested in the introduction, or because culturally in teaching it is rather unusual to read about your pedagogy beyond initial teacher training.

If we consider some of these teacher-authored writings, we can see some trends. Simpson, Rafut & Budd (2015) in their case study of the Camden Lesson Study Project talk about the learning these teachers have made in understanding reasoning in Year 5. They are undoubtedly positive about their experience, it has improved their understanding of differentiation and they now plan to think about using ‘less pace, more space’ in future to allow pupils the opportunity to develop their reasoning. Simpson, Rafut & Budd (2015) do not mention anything beyond themselves that framed their thinking – besides the new National Curriculum (DfE, 2013). There is no reading about differentiation or application of a model they were testing out. Simply this was a group of teachers planning, teaching and reflecting together; a powerful thing, but not necessarily developmental in the long term as eventually the group will no longer have any imbalance of experience or training and as such they will seek answers to questions to which they already have the answers. I actually think

answering the question to which you already know the answer is what Simpson, Rafut & Budd (2015) have done here. They felt they had not done enough reasoning with their pupils before, it is now a more obvious part of the Maths curriculum (DfE, 2013) and as such they concluded it would be sensible to apply what they knew about reasoning to a Lesson Study context. What I want to know is where they would go now with this project, if they could continue to explore reasoning in Year 5. This would depend on their research remit, but would they look at examples of misconceptions in reasoning or perhaps they might look at examples of writing where differentiation is considered in new ways (Swan et al, 2012; Hart et al, 2004; Sahlberg, 2010). Simpson, Rafut & Budd (2015) say they are enthused by Lesson Study but they are not as informed as they could be. Watanabe (2011), Alston et al (2011) and Knapp et al (2011) identify that to enable teachers to gain this educational research insight they need support, as successive changes to the teaching profession have meant that it is harder for teachers to keep up with changes and new research. Simmons (2016) shows how in Japan a Koshi – expert – might help make academic writing more accessible to teachers through a Lesson Study process.

As I mentioned previously, the second trend I have noticed in teachers’ writing on Lesson Study is that their conclusions do not frame themselves in the wider context of pedagogy or seek to challenge or affirm held beliefs. Bennett (2013) talks about the general assumptions of research in schools and how things teachers believe may be grounded in research might, in fact not be as secure as they think or are led to believe. I find the title of the book Teacher-

Proof (Bennett, 2013) difficult as I feel it is too close to that concept Alcoff (2009) presents

where researchers are trying to make sure teachers do not undermine interventions and programmes. Bennett (2013), I feel, is trying to show readers that not all they believe from trainers or policy makers is based on secure research and thus is more a case of proving to teachers that they need to research myths rather than making research teacher-proof. What it

does do as a book is provide stimuli for teachers to start to use their own research – Lesson Study – to not only inform their practice but to act as a means of mediation to research.

Nick (2015) writes that he is in no doubt that Lesson Study was a key component of the schools favourable ‘Good’ from Ofsted. Nick (2015) is similar in tone to Simpson, Rafut & Budd’s (2015) in that it discusses the process of what was done but again does not go beyond the view of people who are involved in the processes – in this case the Ofsted inspection team are used in part to justify the outcomes of the study. It also does not confirm or counter any research, although it hints in its name The Market Place (Nick, 2015) that it has taken on board some of the key ideas presented in research on Japanese Lesson Study, namely the sharing of research. Although this is a feature of Dudley’s (2014) Lesson Study: A Handbook and as such may have been shared at a training event or through initial reading about the integration of Lesson Study as an initial idea. Having met Nick at a recent conference I asked about this lack of reference to research. Nick was clear that this was a development area for the school, and his conference talk was focused on the procedural aspects of Lesson Study within a whole school context. Nick’s school Samuel Whitbread Academy have published their work on Lesson Study in Anthecology (Samuel Whitbread Academy, 2015). This publication which, like Nick’s (2015) article, is generally informed by practice and the school development plan rather than critically inquiring and engaging with educational research. There are elements of research that have filtered through into the work, Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) features in the report by the English department (Samuel Whitbread Academy, 2015:46) and again in the physical education report (Samuel Whitbread Academy, 2015:22).

Generally, the Lesson Study research by teachers, as explored above, encounters the same pitfalls as the published research, in that it focuses on the outcomes of the groups. Nick (2015) told me at the conference I attended that there had been unsuccessful or incomplete research groups in his school, but they were not represented in the book. I wonder what

caused them to be unsuccessful, especially when I know from Nick’s (2015) talk that the performance management of his school was directly linked to the Lesson Study work his teachers undertook. While the potential pitfalls of such a system are a discussion for another time, it is clear that something must have happened to those unsuccessful groups to prevent their completion of the Lesson Study work and that would have been interesting to know more about in itself.

Nick (Samuel Whitbread Academy, 2015) does not include the unsuccessful in his published

account. What made these groups unsuccessful? How was success measured? Why did they

not produce a final report? All of the answers to these questions might further my

understanding of Lesson Study. If I can identify what did not work so well it makes it clearer

how the processes are working as a whole.

I need to explore and understand what makes a group successful or unsuccessful.

Sometimes it feels like only the positive Lesson Study experiences can be presented. Earlier I referenced Rivett (2015) and his trainee experience of Lesson Study, which to me did not feel like Lesson Study from his description but more a paired observation. However, Rivett (2015) is relevant here as his writing is overwhelmingly positive of the entire experience of Lesson Study, and talks about how he enjoyed seeing another subject practitioner teach and make links between subjects. I think it is great when individuals find Lesson Study rewarding, and I think that part of its accessibility is the ease in which people can engage with it. With Rivett, I also think it is worth considering his context a little in this blog – he

was undertaking his teacher training year – as this indicates to why this positive study might be something welcomed by the institution he was studying at as it would endorse their training practices of using Lesson Study, even if that were not the work that Rivett (2015) was describing.

There are links back to dominant culture in education that again exist in the absence of unsuccessful Lesson Study groups from the teacher written research. If a culture is dominated by groups which are constantly looking for successful outcomes, i.e. better performance from schools or outcomes which show something is successful, then it is hard to present something that is counter to this work.

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I feel like it is hard to say, I haven’t succeeded at something. If the school results have not improved, we have failed, even though progress scores might be better. It would be hard to say that a teacher learning program was unsuccessful, because that would mean we did something negative.

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So why is this framing within the dominant culture of Lesson Study research an issue for Lesson Study as a teacher learning tool? It is an issue for Lesson Study in an English school context because if Lesson Study is not effectively used in schools it has the potential to be the next archived method that tried to develop teachers and Bennet (2013) might get to include it in his second book. Lesson Study that is also not explored in its entirety, including its failures, has the potential to become diluted and maybe lose its teacher learning nature, seen in the studies from the United States of America and Japan (Hart, Alston & Murata, 2011, Dudley 2013; Dudley 2015). William (2016) suggests with its current research base Lesson Study does not yet evidence its utility to schools. This dilution was something that Stigler & Hiebert (1999) suggested would be an issue for the successful implementation of Lesson

Study, as they quite rightly predicted that there are wider system issues in English and American education that mean it would be harder to introduce a development method like Lesson Study into schools. Some of these system issues will be addressed in the next section of this chapter and others will be returned to in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 as I evaluate Lesson Study as a teacher learning tool in my school.