To investigate the effectiveness of Japanese lesson study as a collaborative professional development activity for teachers at school level
Date
2018
Authors
Xulu, Pearl Sibongile
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Abstract
The South African schooling system has experienced the development of four different curricula since 1994, which necessitated continuous Professional Development activities for teachers. However, despite these Professional Development programmes, teachers continue to experience problems with their teaching. Possible reasons are that Professional Development activities do not focus on the needs of individual teachers. This motivated for an exploratory type of research in which five Life Sciences (LSs) teachers and a content expert from a local university participated. The researcher of this study organised and facilitated Professional Development activities that involved meiosis at school level. Four teachers from different schools were involved using the Japanese Lesson Study approach (JLS). The data tools involved were propositional knowledge statements that described topic specific content and videotaping the lesson study. The findings of the study showed that the Japanese Lesson Study approach afforded all the participants the opportunity to identify and rectify their individual errors. In addition, the reviewing of the meiosis lessons from the videotapes afforded the participants an opportunity to evaluate their respective instructional strategies applicable in relation to the transformation using the five components of the Topic Specific Pedagogical Content knowledge theoretical framework for this study. The overall results depicted that the meiosis content knowledge in relation to its teaching improved satisfactorily when using the Japanese Lesson Study approach. The implications of this study in the education field is that professional development activities need to redress the content knowledge gaps identified by the teachers themselves including the attainment of effective teaching strategies with the help of the content expert, which will promote learners’ understanding.
Description
A research report submitted in partial completion for a Degree of MSc in Science Education to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 22 September 2017.
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Citation
Xulu, Pearl Sibongile (2017) To investigate the effectiveness of Japanese lesson study as a collaborative professional development activity for teachers at school level, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, https://hdl.handle.net/10539/25008