3rd March
Riccardo Minisola, University of Turin, Italy
Title of the talk:
Lesson Study transposition to Italy: cultural challenges
Abstract:
This seminar will focus on Lesson Study, a collaborative professional development model for mathematics teachers that originated in Japan. Specifically, why we consider Lesson Study beneficial for professional development of Italian mathematics teachers, and the cultural challenges around its introduction in the Italian context.
I will introduce Lesson Study, and discuss how its introduction in contexts that are different from the original one could be approached.
The role of “culture” in professional development practices will be briefly discussed, and I will compare the Japanese and Italian cultural contexts. More specifically, I will describe and compare the context of professional development practices in Japan and Italy. In particular, I will discuss how Lesson Study fits (or could fit) in the two contexts.
Finally, I will describe an experiment of Lesson Study with Italian pre-service mathematics teachers. I will discuss some features of LS that require careful consideration to better introduce LS in the Italian context. After the presentation, I would like to discuss with the participants how they believe that Lesson Study could fit in their institutional context.
References
- Minisola, R., & Manolino, C., (2022). Teachers’ professional development: a cultural matter. How to describe cultural contexts?. In J. Hodgen, E. Geraniou, G. Bolondi & F. Ferretti. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME12) (pp.1-8). Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and ERME.
- Minisola, R., Robutti, O., & Miyakawa, T., (submitted), Didacticians introducing Lesson Study for prospective mathematics teachers’ professional development.
- Miyakawa, T., & Winsløw, C. (2019). Paradidactic infrastructure for sharing and documenting mathematics teacher knowledge: a case study of “practice research” in Japan. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 22(3), 281–303. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-017-9394-y