ABSTRACT
English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers often have few possibilities to develop professionally (Johnston, 1997). Increasing collaborative inquiry-based professional development opportunities for teaching faculty at private language programs has the potential to lead to greater teacher commitment and longer tenure in the field (Tasker, 2006). However, a successful EFL teacher professional development program requires not only a commitment from the teachers and institutional support, but also needs to be perceived by the teachers as relevant to their local teaching context (Yamagata-Lynch & Haudenschild, 2006). Participating in lesson study (Fernandez, Cannon, & Chokshi, 2003; Lewis & Tsuchida, 1997), a teacherdirected collaborative professional development activity, focuses the teachers’ attention on gaps in their students’ learning by creating a mediational space that encourages sustained dialogic interaction about student learning issues that are central to teachers’ everyday teaching practice. The goal of the exploration of student learning within the context of lesson study has the potential to promote greater teacher professional development by focusing teachers’ collective attention on shared student learning issues, and pursue jointly constructed solutions. In doing so, teachers move beyond being not only consumers of top-down expert knowledge, but also producers of school-based, self-directed knowledge by adopting a “researcher lens” and generating questions about student learning posited by the teachers themselves (Fernandez, Cannon, & Chokshi, 2002). Teacher educators experienced in lesson study are instrumental in facilitating teachers new to the process to gradually take on the role of researcher without imposing the educator’s own ideas and solutions on the group. Lesson study can “carve out a role for experts and still remain a teacher-controlled activity” (Chokshi & Fernandez, 2004, p. 525)
Using a developmental work research (DWR) methodology (Engeström, 2007) and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as the theoretical framework, the expansive learning (Engeström, 1999b; 2001) of three EFL teachers engaged in lesson study was investigated during a semester at a private language school in the Czech Republic. This chapter traces the teachers’ participation in lesson study and their efforts to resolve a contradiction between the English language learning their students were prepared to do outside of class (very little), and the progress the
teachers observed the students were making (almost none). Over the first five lesson study meetings, the teachers collaboratively explored ways to encourage their students to take responsibility for their learning, ultimately by creating an artifact that could potentially improve their students’ critical reading skills. The results indicate that lesson study was instrumental in helping the teachers to reach a possible solution to the contradiction between teacher and student activity systems.
