Unpacking Japan's teacher professional development support documents: Strongly framed insights or lacking depth?

This study analysed trends in professional development support documents for teachers prepared by Japanese municipalities. To achieve this, casebooks of teachers' practice, collections of teachers’ research papers, and lesson standards prepared by municipalities and their backgrounds were examined. Municipalities with more schools, supervisors, and outcome goals related to academic achievement scores were likely to prepare lesson standards. Meanwhile, municipalities with educational research institutes tended to prepare casebooks and research paper collections. The results demonstrate diverse patterns of preparing professional development support documents and suggest that all local governments face challenges in making sense of classroom practices. •Trends in professional development support documents for teachers were analysed.•Support documents comprise diverse texts published by local governments.•All document-preparing patterns have some problems in deepening teacher reflection.