Yoshinori Shimizu has written an article that I think will be of great interest to many: Characterizing exemplary mathematics instruction in Japanese classrooms from the learner’s perspective. For more than a decade, researchers have had a focus on teaching practice in East-Asia, and in particular in Japan. Shimizu aims at examining some key characteristics of exemplary mathematics instruction in Japanese eigth-grade classrooms. The article was published online in ZDM on Wednesday. Here is the abstract:

This paper aims to examine key characteristics of exemplary mathematics instruction in Japanese classrooms. The selected findings of large-scale international studies of classroom practices in mathematics are reviewed for discussing the uniqueness of how Japanese teachers structure and deliver their lessons and what Japanese teachers value in their instruction from a teacher’s perspective. Then an analysis of post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with 60 students in three “well-taught” eighth-grade mathematics classrooms in Tokyo is reported to explore the learners’ views on what constitutes a “good” mathematics lesson. The co-constructed nature of quality mathematics instruction that focus on the role of students’ thinking in the classroom is discussed by recasting the characteristics of how lessons are structured and delivered and what experienced teachers tend to value in their instruction from the learner’s perspective. Valuing students’ thinking as necessary elements to be incorporated into the development of a lesson is the key to the approach taken by Japanese teachers to develop and maintain quality mathematics instruction.

Amanda Jansen and Sandy M. Spitzer have written an article entitled Prospective middle school mathematics teachers’ reflective thinking skills: descriptions of their students’ thinking and interpretations of their teaching. The article was published online in Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education on Friday. Jansen and Spitzer takes the belief “that mathematics teacher educators should foster reflective thinking among prospective teachers” as point of departure, and they ask how teacher educators can help students prepare for this. In their article, which I think is very interesting by the way, they present Lesson study as an approach that can be used in order to learn from practice. Their study is also described as a “modified lesson study experience”.

Here is the article abstract:

In this study, we examined prospective middle school mathematics teachers’ reflective thinking skills to understand how they learned from their own teaching practice when engaging in a modified lesson study experience. Our goal was to identify variations among prospective teachers’ descriptions of students’ thinking and frequency of their interpretations about how teaching affected their students’ learning. Thirty-three participants responded to open-ended questionnaires or interviews that elicited reflections on their own teaching practice. Prospective teachers used two forms of nuance when describing their students’ thinking: (1) identifying students’ specific mathematical understandings rather than general claims and (2) differentiating between individual students’ thinking rather than characterizing students as a collective group. Participants who described their students’ thinking with nuance were more likely to interpret their teaching by posing multiple hypotheses with regard to how their instruction affected their students’ learning. Implications for supporting continued growth in reflective thinking skills are discussed in relation to these results.