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A Case of Lesson Study in South Africa

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Theory and Practice of Lesson Study in Mathematics

Part of the book series: Advances in Mathematics Education ((AME))

Abstract

The Wits Maths Connect Secondary Project, a research-linked professional development project, included Lesson Study with teachers in school clusters. When two teachers shared their experiences of doing Lesson Study, they spoke spontaneously about how much they had learned about choosing and using examples in their teaching. Exemplification is a key element of the mathematics teaching framework developed in the project to support planning and reflection in our Lesson Study work. The teachers’ reflection suggested that working on examples had been enabling and empowering. We zoom in on one Lesson Study cycle with the same teachers to give meaning to what, how and why we work with examples in the way that we do and how our LS practices provide a supportive context for this work. Through this we build a case for a focus on exemplification when studying and working on mathematics teaching and for support at a more general level for theoretically informed Lesson Study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is a pseudonym, as are the names of other participants in the paper except the authors of this chapter.

  2. 2.

    Mason makes this point in an earlier version of the 2001 paper with the same title and available on his website.

  3. 3.

    In some papers, this is described as a 20-day course, 16 days on campus and 4 days in school work.

  4. 4.

    Sipho was present but not critically active in the group.

  5. 5.

    There are practical reasons for the unusual almost one-to-one relation between researchers and teachers. The second author was relatively new in the project, learning about LS, and so supported by the first author, the project director and another graduate student who had participated in a previous cycle.

  6. 6.

    The pre- and post-test data are not sufficiently rigorous to make claims about learners’ learning. The pre- and post-tests were used for teachers to see whether they had enabled learners to attend to the object of learning. In this particular case, it was evident across the scripts that most learners were able to correctly expand more expressions than in the pretest.

  7. 7.

    Elsewhere (Alshwaikh and Adler 2017b) we have discussed Thabi’s spontaneous example offered in the lesson. This incident introduced an error and much reflection by the LS group on what and how to deal with a teacher’s error during a lesson and our joint responsibility in this.

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Acknowledgements

This work is based on the research supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation (Grant No. 71218). Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the author(s), and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wits Maths Connect Secondary Project (WMCS), School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Jill Adler

  2. Faculty of Education, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine

    Jehad Alshwaikh

  3. Wits Maths Connect Secondary Project, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Jehad Alshwaikh

Authors
  1. Jill Adler
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  2. Jehad Alshwaikh
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Correspondence to Jill Adler .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA

    Rongjin Huang

  2. College of Education, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Akihiko Takahashi

  3. College of Education, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    JoĂŁo Pedro da Ponte

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Adler, J., Alshwaikh, J. (2019). A Case of Lesson Study in South Africa. In: Huang, R., Takahashi, A., da Ponte, J.P. (eds) Theory and Practice of Lesson Study in Mathematics. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04031-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04031-4_16

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