Leading Lesson Study - By Stef Edwards D.Prof

This 'long read' is about a doctoral study that has absorbed weekends and holidays for the almost the last decade of my professional and personal life. It’s based on a seminar I presented in January 2023 for CLR about my EdD thesis (Edwards, 2022). I start by explaining the background to the study, and why it felt like a good idea at the time. Next, I briefly explain how I established a conceptual/theoretical framework for Lesson Study (LS) leadership – to inform my own understanding of LS and what might be involved in leading it well, how I might need to go about studying and understanding it as a phenomenon, what kinds of data I should collect and how I might analyse and interpret it. I explain my research design, hopefully enough so that you’ll understand what I did, but not so much as to send you to sleep. Finally, I tell you what I found out about LS leadership practice.

I became a headteacher of a small rural primary school in central England in 2006. I had had some previous experience in leading teachers’ professional learning as a primary English specialist working as a Primary Literacy Strategy consultant with schools in our local authority area. I was really interested in ideas about teachers’ professionalism and collegiality and I wanted to establish a thriving professional learning community and research-informed learning culture in my school. I had encountered Lesson Study through the Primary Strategy, but I hadn’t really understood properly what it was until I heard David Pedder and Pete Dudley talk about it at a local event in 2011– and I was hooked. I remember driving back to school completely inspired – thinking this was how I would get my teachers to work together, engage with educational research, build the professional learning community I’d been dreaming about and transform the quality of teaching in my school. I was sold. I ordered the only book I could find on LS from Amazon and planned my staff meeting…

Over the next couple of years we got some funding from the national STEM centre and the NCETM and I railroaded my teachers and local headteacher colleagues into giving LS a go. The teachers in my school were kind, patient and tolerant of my latest enthusiasm. Colleagues in other schools were polite and happy to be released from teaching to take part in the LS projects. Eventually, though, one teacher was brutal. She told me she thought Lesson Study was a complete waste of her time and that she could not see what was in it for her at all. In another nearby school, LS wasn’t going well  – teachers there seemed to resent having to do it. They definitely weren’t relishing their discussions about pedagogy or engaging in earnest professional dialogue about their observations of pupil learning in quite the way I had envisaged. Slowly I started to realise that there might be more to leading lesson study than I had imagined. It pulled me up short and made me think. David Pedder, Professor of Education at the University of Leicester at the time, came to interview me for a research project. Before he left he asked me how LS was going and to be honest I was a bit economical with the truth. I told him it was going swimmingly and showed him a LS poster recently completed by a team in my own school.  As he left, he tapped on the poster and said there was a rich seam of evidence there for a doctoral study. Seed planted.

It took me a year to apply. I finally got started in 2013 and had begun collecting data when in 2016 I changed my job and took on the leadership of a group of schools – in England, a so-called Multi-Academy Trust.  That meant I had to take a year away from my inquiry, and re-think my research design to reflect the change in my role. Then my main supervisor (David Pedder) moved to the University of Brighton, so I moved with him to embark on the second phase of the study. Over the next 3-4 years the Trust grew from 7-11 schools, and embedding effective LS has been an important priority ever since.

It was clear that I had a professional problem with LS leadership. Defining it to arrive at a coherent research question was not so easy. How to lead LS well? What do leaders of effective LS do? What is effective LS exactly? What did I mean by effective? I had embarked on leading LS on the basis of an hour-long talk in a drafty village hall, one book written in 2006 about practice in the US, a government pamphlet and no doubt very irritating evangelical zeal. My supervisor patiently nudged me in the direction of a succession of research papers which provided iterative revelations and made me squirm about the extent of my ignorance. That review helped me to understand what I needed to understand, so that I could understand what LS leaders might need to understand, so that I could observe, analyse, interpret and evaluate both the things they did intentionally and explicitly as well as the things they did tacitly and implicitly. It also helped me to refine my research questions, so that I could start to think about how to design my study.

In my experience lots of people think they know what LS is – but they really don’t. I thought I did, on the basis of a superficial introduction and a bit of rushed reading squeezed in between staff meetings. Properly reading peer-reviewed papers about LS was a revelation to me. I came to the LS literature about two years after I’d started leading it – and was mortified to think of the time and money I’d wasted with such a shallow understanding of how it was really supposed to work. And the research continues – our understanding of what makes effective LS is growing all the time, thanks to a global army of practitioners, researchers and organisations like CLR here in the UK and, globally, WALS. Eventually, our group of schools arrived at Takahashi and McDougal’s (2016) interpretation, which makes clear that LS is not about refining the perfect lesson, but about embedding a sustainable system through which teachers continue to gain knew knowledge about teaching and learning. They emphasise the importance of a clear research purpose for a LS cycle, the place of Kyouzai Kenkyuu  - or a collaborative study phase that takes place before planning the research lesson. Kyouzai Kenkyuu ensures the LS team engages with new knowledge, research evidence and authoritative guidance relevant to the pedagogical or curriculum problem they want to explore, so that they can develop a well-founded theory of action to inform their research proposal (or lesson plan), plan a live research lesson and discussion, and finally share their results or conclusions. This process echoes the inquiry cycle for any research project, starting with identifying the problem, then finding out what is already known about it to develop a theory of action before embarking on your inquiry, gathering data, analysing and evaluating it and reaching conclusions.

The word effective was particularly thorny. What do people mean by it? What did I mean by it? Biesta (2020) had the most useful explanation – that effectiveness is process driven, and whether something is effective or not depends on the purpose ascribed to it – what do you want this process to achieve? What do you want to achieve? If you’re expecting LS to increase your maths test outcomes or transform the teaching of writing  in the space of a year, you might conclude it’s not effective, and you’d be right. But if you want to introduce LS as a long-term strategy to increase teacher engagement with research-informed practice, or to build a collaborative professional  community,  or to establish a sustainable professional learning culture in your school which shines a consistent light on the quality of teaching and pupil learning – and you’re prepared to be patient and do the job properly, effective might be an appropriate evaluation. And of course it’s not the same everywhere as it is in Japan – so understanding how LS has been adapted and translated for different cultural contexts would be very relevant.

LS is all about learning  -  whether it’s understood as teachers’ action research or CPDL (Continuing Professional Development and Learning), its core purpose is to promote teacher learning to improve teaching to improve pupil learning. The EEF PD report (Sims et al 2021), describes LS as a form of teachers’ professional development. Understanding theories of learning  - children’s and adults’ – was therefore a key part of my literature review. By extension, exploring research about teachers’ professional learning was also relevant. It suggested LS has the potential to meet several of the criteria thought to characterise effective CPDL, while also providing a context to support teacher inquiry. I considered research about teacher knowledge, including pedagogical content knowledge, on the basis that LS might have the capacity to contribute to it . It also made sense to explore research about organisational and school learning cultures, including the importance of trust and teacher agency, and to consider the role LS might play.

This is a study about leadership in an educational context, so educational leadership was a major section of the literature review. I looked at typologies of leadership relevant to LS and school leadership, narrowing the focus to leadership of CPDL, of learning cultures, and of school improvement and change – because the point of CPDL is to change and improve teaching practice.  Change is the point of school improvement. And finally, I considered leadership from a practice as well as a competency perspective. I wanted to understand what leaders might need to know and understand, and what they might need to be able to do, but also what they actually do, day-to-day and over time. What is leadership content knowledge? How might leaders manage, develop and mobilise knowledge in their schools? How might they build trustful cultures and promote teacher agency? What is the difference between leadership competency and leadership practice? I explored literature from management research about leadership from a practice perspective and recent research about LS leadership practice in Dutch secondary schools (Van den Bloom-Muilenberg et al, 2022)  I learned from Eric Cheng (2019) about the SECI knowledge management framework and the Japanese concept of ba, which relates to the spaces in which knowledge is generated and how LS might reflect its principles and contribute to leaders’ knowledge management goals (Nonaka and Konno, 1998).

And finally complexity. An early sense that this was all just very complicated grew into a realisation that understanding more about complexity theory and thinking might help me to grasp how complexity might influence LS leadership, and the ways in which LS might emerge, effective or otherwise, as a result of leaders’ efforts and of happenstance.

There’s not space to expound on the excruciating delights of complexity theory here, so I’ve included links to a presentation and guide published by the Systems Innovation Network which provides a useful introduction to some key complexity concepts, and to a YouTube video of a presentation and a paper by Mark Mason from the University of Hong Kong in which he explains his research into the relevance of complexity theory to educational improvement and change. Very briefly – and with apologies to anyone who knows anything about complexity theory - social networks (like those found in education) are complex systems, subject to infinite numbers and types of overlapping, nested, connected and random human interactions and events, which make moving in an uninterrupted line from position A to goal B very challenging. Leaders have to navigate this complexity to achieve their school improvement goals.

Mason (2008) suggests leaders might feel helpless in the face of the potential for chaos inherent in complexity, but that they should not be defeated. Through research-informed strategy and by tackling change from different angles at the same time, leaders can influence the direction of travel and nudge progress towards their objectives.

The diagram above is an imperfect 2D illustration of a manifestly multi-dimensional theoretical / conceptual framework. It shows three levels of LS leadership: teacher leaders, school leaders and system leaders, operating within and attempting to establish a set of conditions, cultures, processes and structures which support LS. All require an understanding of how children and adults learn, what is required to establish trustful organisational cultures and to lead professional learning, pedagogical and school change and improvement. The perforated lines indicate the influence of complexity – there are no neat dividing lines in this scenario – each element overlaps and seeps across boundaries with its neighbours, interacting in unpredictable and random ways. The LS leadership practices in this diagram are yet to be identified. This was the aim of the inquiry and these were my research questions:

In a network of eleven English primary schools:

·       how do leaders influence the implementation of effective and sustainable Lesson Study?

·       what kinds of leadership practices do teachers and leaders perceive to promote organisational conditions, cultures, processes and structures which establish and sustain effective LS within and across schools?

Having decided on my questions, the next challenge was to design a study. This involved learning a plethora of polysyllabic words, philosophical concepts and ideas about knowledge that tied my brain in knots, required a dictionary glued to my hand and felt like knitting a bag of fog. It’s a qualitative, interpretivist study, which views new knowledge as constructed from the perceptions, inferences and experiences of the researcher and research participants. What ended up being the first of two phases of data collection started off as an ethnographic study, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. This had to be adapted after the change in my professional role in 2016. This was when I discovered crystallisation – introduced to the world of qualitative research by Laurel Richardson (2000) and Laura Ellingson (2009; 2014).

Crystallisation provided a methodological  framework to weave together multiple methodologies, data sources and perspectives over a sustained period of time. It meant I could combine ethnography, phenomenology (the phenomenon is LS leadership) and narrative research. I could collect data through participant observation, semi-structured Pictor interviews and narrative writing and interweave my researcher perspective with those of LS participants and teacher leaders, school leaders and system leaders from within and across eleven schools, interwoven with my own. I could also collect and analyse other data such as LS reports, posters and policy documents. Ellingson (2014) talks about the truth dazzling gradually. Like a crystal, clarity emerges from different directions, different sources, at different rates and at different times.

Below is an example of an anonymised Pictor chart. Pictor is an approach to interviewing borrowed from health research and allows the informant to take a bird’s-eye view of a complex, collaborative situation and consider how it is influenced by the interactions between people involved. It allows informants to tell their own story, but within a clear research interview agenda. The interviewer provides a big (A3) piece of paper and a selection of coloured, arrow-shaped sticky notes and asks the informant to spend twenty minutes or so alone, thinking about a LS cycle they have been involved with, and using the arrows to represent the people involved, orientating them to show negative and positive influences in a mind-map way that is meaningful to them. The researcher then returns and records the informant talking through their resulting chart, asking probing questions during the discussion where appropriate.

There were two phases of data collection. Phase One happened between 2014-2016, up to the point at which my job changed and I suspended the study for a year (formally anyway). Phase Two took place after that period, between 2017-2019, when the number of schools involved in the study increased and my capacity for direct involvement in LS as a participant decreased.

I used Nvivo to analyse my interview transcripts and field notes. Nvivo is a qualitative research analysis programme. I used it to conduct an inductive, thematic analysis, organising my analysis around levels of leadership and themes informed by my theoretical framework. After completing the thematic analysis I moved on to narrative analysis, using iterative narrative writing to refine my analysis and draw out my findings.

There were three phases of analysis. My initial focus was on the LS supports leaders were trying to establish  - the conditions, cultures, processes and structures LS might need to thrive. I spent ages, at least three complete data sweeps in Nvivo, categorising against these support themes and sub-themes. After about two years, I realised with dismay that this wasn’t answering my research questions. I understood what leaders were trying to achieve, but not what they were actually doing. This was very depressing. I felt like I’d wasted so much time and quite defeated at the prospect of starting all over again. However, I eventually remembered (at three o’clock one morning) what Pring (2015) and Spillane (2006) had said about not being able to understand practice without also understanding the rationale and motivation for it. This made me feel a lot better. That initial data analysis phase wasn’t wasted effort after all. I needed to know why as well as what, so all was well. During Phase 2, I was looking for what leaders were doing, and Phase 3 involved mapping the connections between the findings of Phases 1 and 2.

Findings: LS Leaders’ goals for establishing LS supports

This is not an exhaustive list of themes from my findings from Phase 1 – leaders had many objectives and goals which related in some way to implementing and leading LS. These were the dominant ones that I decided to write about in detail in my thesis. I take each of the four supports in turn and explain what I found about the key aspects of each of them, starting with primary conditions required for LS to succeed and including some quotes from research participants.

Conditions for LS

Dedicated time during working hours for teachers to participate in LS and for someone to facilitate it in some way was essential. Teachers did not begrudge giving their time to participation in LS per se. Resentment was reserved for leaders’ expectation that they would engage outside working hours. Conversely, when time was provided and protected, teachers genuinely valued it; they perceived this as leaders investing in their development both in effort and resource and appeared then to be more willing to continue their engagement beyond the allocated time.

School leaders acknowledged the importance of providing protected time for LS. One teacher reflected that the school’s first attempt to introduce LS had failed largely because leaders had not allocated adequate time. Their view was that teachers perceived the lack of provision for adequate time to participate in LS as a sign that leaders were not committed to their professional growth and did not value their personal time or even their wellbeing. They felt that this had caused cultural damage which had derailed the introduction of LS, and inhibited attempts to re-introduce it two years later. At that point, some teachers told their less experienced colleagues not to engage as they would be expected to participate in their own time. The teacher noted the single word ‘time’ on one sticky note in their Pictor chart – but they talked at length in their interview about the lasting damage insufficient dedicated time had inflicted on teachers’ attitudes to LS in the school.

Teachers and leaders at all levels repeatedly discussed the role of facilitation and the facilitator in successful LS. By the end of Phase 1, skilled facilitation was emerging as important to secure the other primary conditions for LS, for example, dedicated time in working hours during which it could take place, and trustful relationships and explicit leadership commitment to successful LS. Initial findings from my early data analysis led to a programme of facilitator training in my network and the establishment of the LS facilitator role in schools implementing LS.

The absence of leaders from LS, either as leaders and/or facilitators or participants, was construed by participants and colleagues as ambivalence – and not just towards LS. It undermined trust in the process and teachers felt their work in LS was not valued. In some cases their absence undermined the leaders’ professional credibility – why were leaders expecting teachers to expose their professional vulnerabilities in research lessons but not prepared to do the same? Conversely when leaders did take part, and take their turn in teaching, their credibility and esteem was enhanced. Teachers saw evident leadership commitment to LS, their interest and their participation as a demonstration that leaders valued their work, their effort and their CPDL and that they were prepared to lead by example.

Cultures for LS

Trust was so very important. Successful LS did not appear to be possible without trust, making trust, by my definition, a primary condition. Teachers needed to trust in the credibility of leaders’ intentions and their commitment and in facilitators’ expertise; that the guidance and information they were given was grounded in evidence; that there would be no performative agenda related to observations of learning in LS; that their teaching would not be judged, and that they were free to be vulnerable in trustful LS contexts. Trust was so fundamental that it must be a primary condition for successful LS. Trust was also palpable in functioning LS contexts, and leaders especially felt that teachers’ and leaders’ engagement in LS promoted trustful relationships and cultures, where previously they may have been lacking. On this basis, trust may be a cultural feature promoted by LS and a cultural condition for LS.

There was evidence in the data that collaboration takes place in successful LS, and also that LS may provide a context which promotes authentic collaborative cultures in which participants are supported to work together in ways that promote practice change, either through planned and intentional CPDL and/or Teachers’ Action Research. LS reflects many of the collaborative characteristics of Professional Learning and/or Inquiry Communities, and of the Network Learning Communities found in school improvement science (Bryk et al. 2015)

The school improvement urgency that comes, for example, after a difficult school inspection, can be a catalyst for school change to which LS can contribute. Teachers wanted to be included in discussions with leaders about school improvement priorities and actively wanted their LS inquiry topics to be relevant and to contribute to school improvement work. They valued being part of open and transparent discussions about areas for development. They didn’t want to feel that their efforts in LS were superfluous or irrelevant to leaders. They wanted grown-up conversations with leaders based on authentic collaboration and professional reciprocity. This was particularly relevant to teachers’ sense of agency – another important strand of evidence linked to supportive LS cultures.

Teachers valued being involved in decisions relating to focuses for LS inquiry, based on discussion and consensus about school improvement priorities with leaders. This was connected to the value they placed on effective facilitation, structures and systematic organisational routines informed by clear protocols. Teacher agency and commitment to LS appeared to be enhanced rather than inhibited by facilitation.

Priestley et al (2012) see agency as something teachers’ can achieve which influences their motivation, engagement and investment in change initiatives. It may have an important role to play both in teachers’ receptive learning in LS and in the contribution LS might make to the school’s wider learning culture. Trust also plays a huge part here – Schein (2017) uses the metaphor of cultural islands, psychologically safe spaces in which people can manage change anxiety and make mistakes without fear of judgement or sanction. Teachers and leaders said LS provided a threat-free, level playing field for professional collaboration.

Leaders at all levels suggested that clear protocols contributed to the success of LS. Protocols valued by LS participants and perceived by them to promote successful LS cycles included:

·       written guidance in policy documents about key components of LS (based on Takahashi and MacDougal 2016) and how to conduct a LS cycle;

·       flow charts showing expectations about the sequence of events

·       joint authorship and publication of LS cycle report and/or poster;

·       research lesson observation proforma.

Teachers valued both having the time to explore research literature before embarking on lesson planning and having a trusted facilitator to mediate access to relevant papers, books and authoritative guidance. This saved them valuable time and provided assurance that the material provided was credible and from reliable sources. There was an implicit recognition, too, that a sharply-focused period of Kyouzai Kenkyuu supported the process of refining the LS inquiry question and helped the LS team more clearly articulate a theory of action to inform their research lesson planning. There was a clear sense of the process enhancing teachers’ sense of professionalism and academic gravitas, reminding them of their time at university and their enjoyment of professional, academic and critical dialogue. The approach taken in this network of schools to structuring a LS cycle around organisational routines and processes, included a structured period of Kyouzai Kenkyuu or study at the beginning of a LS cycle. The process of planning the research lesson does not take place until participants have reviewed a range of literature and/or guidance pertinent to the inquiry focus and/or engaged with authoritative guidance with the support of a Koshi or knowledgeable other (often a subject specialist). Only then would they refine their LS inquiry question and use their new understanding to frame an approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a new aspect of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, which was then trialled in the research lesson.

Several systematic organisational routines related to LS emerged as valuable to participants. I focused on a sample, which included:

·       disciplined time keeping – making sure things happened when they were meant to happen;

·       meeting schedules and routines which contribute to knowledge mobilisation such as Open House research lessons – scheduling these events as part of the cycle so everyone knew they would be working towards them – serves as both an internal accountability mechanism and added authenticity to the work.

·       sustained follow-up after a LS cycle is complete. Participants and leaders felt follow up was essential; without it they felt their LS work wasn’t valued. This might include a staff meeting soon after the cycle was finished to share the LS outcomes with colleagues, and time for the team to meet later to review whether practice change had been sustained, discuss issues raised by the work and so on. 

Open House research lessons

An Open House (OH) lesson is a research lesson to which colleagues, either from within and/or beyond the host school were invited. The context of the research lesson was explained to guest participants before the research lesson began, including the pedagogical or curriculum challenge explored during the course of the cycle’s inquiry focus, research literature reviewed and/or guidance used during Kyouzai Kenkyuu, the rationale for change and the approach to evaluation, key strategies included in the research lesson design and where the research lesson sat within a sequence of lessons. Open House guests would be provided with copies of the research proposal or lesson plan, the LS report or poster for information and a lesson observation pro-forma to direct their observational focus towards pupils rather than the teacher during the research lesson. After the lesson, guests were invited to participate in a structured post-lesson discussion, facilitated by an invited Koshi (subject specialist) where possible. LS participants were initially daunted by the prospect of Open House lessons, but often found the experience rewarding and even exhilarating. One interviewee suggested the OH lesson gave purpose to the LS cycle. They felt their work was being acknowledged and valued by their colleagues and they felt proud to have participated and contributed. This sense of pride and purpose was echoed in other leaders’ responses. Leaders and System Leaders suggested that opening lessons up to colleagues enhanced the significance of the LS work in the eyes of the participants. They took LS more seriously, with a heightened sense of accountability for conducting it to a high standard. They were concerned about the quality of their teaching, the pupils’ learning and the lesson design, and the way in which they practised LS. They wanted to represent their LS team, their colleagues and their school well.

Posters, meetings and discussion

The network’s LS protocol required the publication of a written report in the form of a poster (Fig.12) at the end of a cycle. These posters were collected and stored in an online shared space. They were displayed at the network’s annual conference (pre-pandemic), with contributors on hand to explain the LS cycle to interested conference delegates. Informants’ responses suggested resignation and exasperation at all levels of leadership around these posters. The resignation came from a tacit acceptance that some form of write-up of a LS cycle was needed. There was a consensus that the poster format provided a manageable template on which to record the core elements of a LS inquiry cycle. The exasperation came from a sense that not enough use is made of the poster once published. To teachers this seemed a waste of their effort and a missed opportunity to mobilise new knowledge generated through LS. They felt deflated after a LS cycle had concluded, as if the intensity of engagement was followed by a vacuum in which their work and the potential to contribute to pedagogical improvement more widely faded away as the poster corners curled.

Structures for LS

Teachers needed to feel confident that their pupils were in competent hands in their absence, not only to release them from their classroom duties to engage in LS, but also so that they could concentrate fully on LS participation, without worrying about what was happening to their pupils in their absence, or feeling guilty about abandoning them to potentially poor provision. When leaders had put in place reliable and established structures to secure regular, high quality cover for classes to release LS participants, teachers recognised and valued their effort, commitment and investment in teachers’ CPDL. Staffing structures designed to provide the class release time that data indicate is so important to successful LS emerged over time as leaders shared experiences and strategies. Approaches were influenced by school funding and budgets, but network policy acknowledged concerns that the quality of curriculum provision for pupils while their teachers were engaging in any form of CPDL including LS should be high. In practice, school leaders in this study deployed a combination of HLTAs and specialist instructors, most often for PE, Sport and Forest School, but also Art, Computing and Music to cover teachers’ LS release time. Developments in digital technology during the COVID-19 pandemic presented opportunities for remote delivery of specialist teaching, supported and facilitated by teaching assistants physically present in classroom; these were being trialled at the time of writing, in LS and other contexts. Releasing teachers to participate in LS is a significant logistical and financial challenge for leaders, but practices established over time in schools in this study demonstrated that the challenges are not insurmountable when factored into schools’ strategic financial planning. One teacher leader said: ‘It feels to me like [LS] can’t be treated as an add-on to CPDL, it’s got to be at the centre of it, hasn’t it? It’s almost got to be the centre of the ethos of the school and the culture of the school in terms of how teachers make decisions about lessons.’

Findings: LS Leaders’ Practices

This brings me to findings from the second phase of analysis, looking for evidence of leaders’ practices, of what LS leaders actually do. I found three categories of practice, outlined with examples of related practices in Table  2.

Table 2: Categories and examples of leadership practice

The first was all about the systems and strategies leaders devised, for example their plans for how LS would link to schools’ strategic improvement priorities, how they would schedule the year’s LS cycles, put staffing structures in place to release teachers to take part and leaders and subject specialists to facilitate and lead Kyouzai Kenkyuu, make provision for knowledge mobilisation after a cycle, arrange staff meetings, Open House lessons etc. Many of these had to be planned, staffed and calendared in advance and therefore needed careful planning and aligning to other school activities and priorities.

The second was about the day-to-day operational and intentional actions leaders undertook to secure successful LS implementation, like appointing LS facilitators, organising staff meetings, telling office staff not to redeploy LS participants to cover staff absence, or arranging for a subject specialist to support a LS cycle.

Thirdly, I found evidence of leaders’ dispositions towards LS – their behaviours and attitudes, positive or otherwise, and often tacit, unintentional and implicit. They included the commitment they showed in their language or behaviours, whether or not they participated in cycles, made time for staff meetings (and attended or led them) or follow up sessions for the LS teams after LS cycles, attending Open House lessons, including LS in their development plans, teachers professional development. Examples of all three categories are shown in table 2. The practices shown in Table 2, are intrinsically connected to the leadership goals in Table 1; they represent the what and the why of LS leadership.

Table 3 represents the third phase of data analysis. It maps leaders’ practices to the LS supports – their LS leadership goals. It helped me to identify four main patterns of practice. I concluded that the yellow practices (related to providing time) and the blue practices (provision of facilitation) relate directly to LS implementation. The peach practices (relating to the leadership of change and improvement) and green practices (related to CPDL and teacher inquiry) are linked to pedagogical change and school improvement. The perforations, as for the theoretical framework, indicated the artificiality of the boundaries – which in reality are not neat, or straight, but subject to the forces of complexity, messy, tangled and unpredictable. If LS leaders manage the balance between leadership practices and objectives well, and the LS complexity gods are smiling, with luck and a following wind, effective LS sometimes emerges.

Doctorate-ness involves demonstrating that your study has made an original contribution to knowledge in your field of inquiry, however small. I summarise my contribution to knowledge about LS leadership in the slide above and explain it below.

Theory is important. Leaders need a theoretical understanding of LS itself, of learning and leadership. They need to know about the supports LS requires to succeed, and they need to be clear in their own minds and to others about the purposes they ascribe to LS. Armed with secure theoretical, conceptual understanding they can develop their own coherent theories of action and plan and enact relevant and appropriate practices. They can design coherent systems and strategies, undertake actions to achieve their goals – some of which will be intentional and explicit, some tacit and implicit. Clarity of purpose and conceptual understanding lends authenticity to behaviour, contributes to commitment, informs language, and builds predictability and relational trust.

I personally don’t need convincing that LS, when it is well-led, has the potential to be a form of CPDL which can help kill many birds with one boulder. LS is an inquiry-based, sustainable, long-term approach to CPDL which can improve teaching in ways that improve pupil learning. My research suggests LS can also promote teachers’ professionalism, collaboration and collegiality and help to build resilient school professional learning cultures and communities. This study didn’t set out to persuade anyone about the value of LS – I assume anyone interested in this study is already converted. But LS is a very heavy boulder. Implementing LS is challenging and difficult because it involves lots of people in social networks and is therefore bound to be influenced by complexity. It will always emerge slightly differently every single time, because of the different people involved, their differing interpretations, (however clear and beautifully written the protocols are), different cultural contexts, different children, different school improvement and pedagogical problems and therefore different LS research objectives. LS will be different in the same school, in schools in the same Trust or town. The factors and variables influencing LS leadership, like those influencing anything worth doing in schools, are infinite. Leadership of anybody’s learning, school improvement and change is hard. There have been questions about the efficacy of LS. With the complexity involved, lack of clarity about purpose and the crucial contribution of leadership, it is unsurprising that it is not consistently successful. It was therefore worth the effort to try to unpick what leaders might usefully do to secure its success. Without committed and informed leadership implementing practices oriented towards establishing the supports it needs, successful and sustainable LS is probably doomed. When these things do happen, it can flourish and thrive, and over time, has the potential to transform school professional learning cultures and the quality of teaching and learning.

References

Biesta, G. (2020) Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Bryk, A.S., Gomez, L.M., Gruno, A. and Le Mahieu, P.G. (2015) Learning to Improve: how America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press

Cheng, E. C. K. (2019) Successful Transposition of Lesson Study: A Knowledge Management Perspective. Hong Kong: Springer

Edwards, S.G. (2022) Promoting and sustaining Lesson Study as a form of effective professional learning: an investigation of the practices enacted by teacher, school and system leaders. D. Prof. thesis. University of Brighton

Ellingson, L. L. (2009) Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ellingson L. L. (2014) ‘’The truth must dazzle gradually’’: Enriching relationship research using a crystallization framework. Journal of Social and Personal  Relationships, 31(4) pp. 442–450.

Lewin, K. (1943) Psychology and the process of group living. Journal of Social Psychology, 17 pp.113–131.

Mason, M. (2008) What Is Complexity Theory and What Are Its Implications for Educational Change? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(1) pp. 35-49.

Nonaka, I. and Konno, N. (1998) The Concept of ‘Ba’: building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review, 40 pp. 40-54.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2012). Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change. Working Paper from the Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change Project, ESRC reference: RES-000-22-4208.

Pring, R. (2015) Philosophy of Educational Research. London: Bloomsbury.

Richardson, L. (2000) Writing: a method of inquiry, in Denzin, N. K., and  Lincoln  Y. S. (Eds) (2005) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Schein, E. H. (2017) Organisational Culture and Leadership, Canada: Wiley.

Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J. and Anders, J. (2021) What are the Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Spillane, J.P. (2006) Distributed Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Takahashi, A. and McDougal, T. (2016) Collaborative lesson research: maximizing the impact of LS. ZDM Mathematics Education, 48(4) pp. 513-526.

Van Den Boom-Muilenberg, S.N., De Vries, S., Van Veen, K., Poortman, C. and Schildkamp, K. (2022) Leadership Practice and Sustained Lesson Study. Education Research. Open Access https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131881.2022.2090982