Co-Constructing New Classroom Practices: Professional Development Based upon the Principles of Lesson Study

A challenge for educational employing authorities is the provision of high-quality, sustainable professional development opportunities that will lead to positive growth in teachers' pedagogical practices. The study reported here sought to devise and implement a model of teacher professional development that would result in such growth by increasing mathematics content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. While there were a number of components to the study, including the investigation of a relationship between teacher professional learning and improved student learning outcomes, this paper focuses upon the changes in teachers' beliefs and practices as reported by the teacher participants, their students, and observed by the researcher. A variety of qualitative methods for data collection were used in order to develop a complete picture of the nature of teacher growth. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Shaping the Future of Mathematics Education. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (33rd, Freemantle, Western Australia, Australia, July 3-7, 2010)," see ED520764.]