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Reorienting the cultural script of teaching: cross cultural analysis of a science lesson

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reveal the cultural script of the teaching of a lower secondary science lesson on the topic “Classification of Non-living Things” in Singapore through the eyes of Japanese and Singaporean researchers and teachers. In particular, the study analyzes the structural content, i.e. organization of learning activities of a lower secondary science lesson of Singapore and the culture of teaching, i.e. views about teaching held as tacit knowledge of science teachers. It focusses on students’ inquiry skills in a participative and problem-driven science lesson in the Singapore classroom. Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study adopts a cultural approach of viewing teaching and learning and compares classroom practice in two countries – Japan and Singapore. Contextually, the cultural differences in beliefs and values define how educators learn about what is “good” teaching. Findings – The cultural script of teaching of the science lesson case values the setting of learning tasks that encourage a variety of ideas. It also sets a tone of inquiry-based learning where students are open to questioning, the formulation of ideas and the presentation of solutions. In the science lesson case, the teacher aimed at providing opportunities for students to think for themselves and to engage in group discussion. This study identifies key aspects of the science lesson for revealing the teaching script based on a cross-cultural lesson analysis. Figure 1 summarizes such facets of teacher teaching and student learning in detail as a result of the lesson analysis. Furthermore, it draws attention to recognizing areas of the lesson script which the Japanese team found effective/ineffective as well as identifying the Singaporean team's reflections on feedback from Japanese educators. Research limitations/implications – Through this study, the research team raises the following questions. Are there common practices that make for effective learning and if so what are these? From the perspectives of Japanese and Singaporean researchers and educators, what might be the different elements of teaching that will bring about better student learning? Originality/value – An important avenue for inquiry in teaching is how to create teaching-learning processes that nurture students’ ability to deal with the unexpected as well as their application skills – competencies that are required of students to function in the twenty-first century. The research team suggests a cross-cultural analysis approach for future research investigating the cultural script of teaching.

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Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) has spread outside Japan in the last decade, providing opportunities to see how lesson study fares in countries where the instructional practices and curriculum materials differ from those in Japan. This study reports an elementary mathematics lesson study cycle from the United States. To investigate the nature of the support for teachers' learning during the curriculum study ("kyouzai kenkyuu") phase of lesson study, we first compared a US. and Japanese teacher's manual in their treatment of area of quadrilaterals. The coding scheme captured features hypothesized to influence teachers' learning from curriculum including information on student thinking, learning trajectory and rationale for pedagogical decisions (Ball & Cohen, 1996). While the US. teacher's manual provided more correct student answers and more often suggested adaptations for particular categories of students (e.g., English-language learners), the Japanese manual provided more varied individual student responses and more rationale for pedagogical choices. We provided the Japanese curriculum and teacher's c manual to a US. lesson group and observed them during lesson study; US. teachers found some Japanese curriculum features useful (e.g., student thinking) and other features challenging (e.g., focus on a single problem). A comparison of the US. teachers' pre-and post-lesson study cycle lesson plans suggested that the teachers more thoroughly anticipated student thinking after working with the Japanese textbooks and teacher's manuals. We suggest that kyouzai kenkyuu on a well-designed teacher's manual may enable "coherent curriculum" at the policy level to be enacted in the classroom.
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At the beginning of the 21st century, our challenge as educators is to try to enhance our international perspectives while engaging in the process of updating our knowledge and skills for living in a rapidly changing world. An examination of the Japanese approach to national curriculum standards reform, especially the period for integrated study, and their challenges in practice has potential benefits worldwide for school teachers, administrators, policy-makers and curriculum developers to learn from their Japanese counterparts. The study discusses the issues related to the practical implementation of the new integrated study period, including concerns of teachers relating to their role in designing and preparation of the new course, and of school administrators at the inadequate teacher training for the task. Media speculation and community concerns about the relation between introduction of the new integrated study periods and the recent falling rank of Japanese students in science and mathematics achievement in TIMSS and PISA tests are also considered. Survey evidence of positive students response to the new course, and the growing lack of interest and motivation among Japanes students in science and mathematics and the relationship between these factors is also considered. The authors conclude that further research is needed to assess the new curriculum standards and the integrated learning approach in practice.
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In this essay, Gary Thomas argues that education research repeatedly makes a mistake first noted by Dewey: it misunderstands our science. This misunderstanding has led to attempts to import various putatively scientific precepts into education inquiry. But in reality, he argues, those "scientific" precepts do not characterize scientific endeavor, which is fluid and plural: science flexes to any angle to answer the questions that are posed in any field. Questions in education concern worlds of practice and social relations where change and corrigibility draw the parameters for inquiry. Education research becomes valuable only when it takes account of the reality of the educational endeavor. Thomas urges us to strive to forge a new science of education based on singular and shared understandings of such practice.
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In this article, Susan Moore Johnson calls for a balanced approach to improving teaching and learning, one that focuses on both teachers and the contexts in which they work. Drawing on over a decade of research on the experiences of new teachers, Johnson argues that focusing on the effectiveness of individuals while ignoring how their schools are organized limits our capacity to support teachers' work and, thus, to improve the outcomes for our nation's neediest students.
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In this article, Anthony Bryk, Heather Harding, and Sharon Greenberg report on a roundtable jointly sponsored by Teach For America and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The authors brought together a group of scholars and practitioners with a broad range of perspectives and asked them to explore several questions related to the emerging national narrative on effective teachers: What is an effective teacher? How do we leverage this moment of enormous energy in producing more effective teaching to advance meaningful improvements at scale? Where are the current sites of success? What can we learn from what is working? The article is organized around the edited transcript of the roundtable discussion and is supplemented by author commentaries. The authors seek to illuminate and reimagine the current "nonsystem" in order to accelerate progress toward a wholly new approach to developing the teaching force our nation and our children need.
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Working on teaching as a collective practice—understanding it, specifying it, and improving it—is crucially important and too often ignored. But setting up a choice between improving teaching and improving teachers is problematic for several reasons. To begin with, it seems that the very methods Hiebert and Morris outline for improving teaching necessarily imply the simultaneous improvement of teachers. Improvement as they describe it suggests a “generative dance” between the organizational knowledge embedded in artifacts and the individuals who learn how to use and continuously improve those artifacts. Looking at teaching through the lens of practice theory has two important consequences: it challenges the dichotomy between individual and collective learning, and it focuses attention on the systematization of resources in the organizational setting as an important component of competence building.
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For several historical and cultural reasons, the United States has long pursued a strategy of improving teaching by improving teachers. The rarely questioned logic underlying this choice says that by improving the right characteristics of teachers, they will teach more effectively. The authors expose the assumptions on which this logic is built, propose an alternative approach to improving teaching that engages teachers (and researchers) directly in the work of improving teaching, present some indirect evidence to support this approach, and examine the cultural traditions and beliefs that have kept the conventional approach in place for so long.
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Research on learning science in informal settings and the formal (sometimes experimental) study of learning in classrooms or psychological laboratories tend to be separate domains, even drawing on different theories and methods. These differences make it difficult to compare knowing and learning observed in one paradigm/context with those observed in the other. Even more interestingly, the scientists studying science learning rarely consider their own learning in relation to the phenomena they study. A dialectical, reflexive approach to learning, however, would theorize the movement of an educational science (its learning and development) as a special and general case—subject matter and method—of the phenomenon of learning (in/of) science. In the dialectical approach to the study of science learning, therefore, subject matter, method, and theory fall together. This allows for a perspective in which not only disparate fields of study—school science learning and learning in everyday life—are integrated but also where the progress in the science of science learning coincides with its topic. Following the articulation of a contradictory situation on comparing learning in different settings, I describe the dialectical approach. As a way of providing a concrete example, I then trace the historical movement of my own research group as it simultaneously and alternately studied science learning in formal and informal settings. I conclude by recommending cultural-historical, dialectical approaches to learning and interaction analysis as a context for fruitful interdisciplinary research on science learning within and across different settings.
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This paper discusses aspects of Japanese expository prose or‐ginazation through an overt comparison of similar English expository prose writings. It is shown that English prose paragraphs are defined through a uniform orientation and that the paragraph topic is established early in the paragraph. English paragraphs have a hierarchical structure, with an indefinite number of subtopics, or perspectives. Japanese paragraphs, on the other hand, tend to be organized by a return to a baseline theme at the initiation of each subtopic, or perspective. Perspectives are more loosely connected, although there is some cohesive‐ness. The overall structure of a Japanese paragraph contains (1) an introduction (2) directly or indirectly related comments, and (3) an optional generalization, summation, or both.
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To solve two enduring problems in education—unacceptably large variation in learning opportunities for students across classrooms and little continuing improvement in the quality of instruction—the authors propose a system that centers on the creation of shared instructional products that guide classroom teaching. By examining systems outside and inside education that build useful knowledge products for improving the performance of their members, the authors induce three features that support a work culture for creating such products: All members of the system share the same problems for which the products offer solutions; improvements to existing products are usually small and are assessed with just enough data; and the products are jointly constructed and continuously improved with contributions from everyone in the system.
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This paper looks at the familiar problem of students' understanding of elementary electrical circuits from a much neglected point of view. It is conjectured that the patterning commonly found in students' ideas might have its roots in the cognitive processing with which students operate their mental models of d.c. electrical circuits. The data are new and come from Japanese 10-11 year olds living in the UK. Progressive analysis of these students' answers to a six item test shows that the percentage of students operating particular mental models, following tuition, matches the percentages one might expect from a knowledge of their cognitive processing.
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In an attempt to accelerate the development of formal operations in average young adolescents, intervention lessons relating to all formal schemata were designed in the context of school science courses. Over a period of two years, up to 30 intervention lessons were given by science teachers to their classes in eight schools. Boys who started the program aged 12+ showed a pre-posttest effect size on Piagetian tests of 0.89 SD compared with control classes. In terms of British norms for the development of operational thinking this was a mean change from the 51st to the 74th percentile. Neither the middle school students nor the 12+ girls showed greater gain than the controls. Gains were shown by girls in one 11+ class and in the two 11+ laboratory classes. In the laboratory school students given intervention lessons by the researchers maintained their gains over controls in formal operations at a delayed posttest one year after cessation of the program. There was no effect on tests of science achievement during the intervention. It was argued that the interventions needed to be accompanied by in-service training designed to enable teachers to change their teaching style in line with their students' increased operational thinking capacity.
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