Co-constructing subject-specific pedagogical knowledge during lesson study in initial teacher education

Teacher training programs have the task of making their student teachers proficient in subject-specific teaching methods. Due to their limited teaching experience, most student teachers lack practical knowledge, which puts significant emphasis on studying subject-specific teaching literature. Despite the rich availability of resources in the subject of Dutch that offer recent, understandable, and applicable teaching insights, student teachers often experience a gap between these theories and their practical application. To help bridge this gap between theory and practice, they benefit from learning tasks that assist them in applying theory in complex, open, and authentic situations. These tasks allow them time to reflect, experiment with new teaching approaches, and investigate how these approaches impact student learning. Lesson study is one such learning task. In a lesson study, a team of teachers selects a learning problem of their own students that they want to investigate. They go through a cycle of (1) problem analysis; (2) design of a research lesson; (3) execution of the lesson and collection of empirical data by observing and interviewing students; and (4) reflection, redesign, execution, data collection, etc. Conversations and document analyses show, among other things, that student teachers succeed in developing and applying new subject-specific teaching knowledge based on theoretical input. Cognitive conflicts experienced during the reflection phase, due to unexpected student reactions, also led to the development of subject-specific teaching knowledge. Therefore, Lesson study appears to be a suitable learning task to reduce the gap between theory and practice.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/ae8ccd1e-7512-4a03-89aa-dd0cd941e273