Introduction: Conceptual Overview of Lesson Study

Lesson study is a collaboration-based teacher professional development approach that originated in Japan (Fernandez and Yoshida 2004; Lewis and Tsuchida 1998; Stigler and Hiebert 1999). Lesson study attracted the attention of an international audience in the past decade, and in 2002 it was one of the foci for the Ninth Conference of the International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME). It subsequently spread to many other countries and more than a dozen international conferences and workshops were held around the world in which people shared their experiences and progress with lesson study as they adopted this new form of professional development in their unique cultural contexts (e.g., Conference on Learning Study 2006; Fujita et al. 2004; Lo 2003; National College for Educational Leadership 2004; Shimizu et al. 2005).

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