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School systems around the world are adopting more intellectually ambitious academic content in the hopes of improving their educational productivity. In the United States, these efforts have required significant changes to teachers' instructional practices, and increased attention to teachers' formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities. Focusing on the initial implementation of a reform-oriented approach to teaching mathematics in two local school systems in the United States, this paper examines whether – and under what circumstances – elementary teachers' professional learning opportunities predict changes in their instructional practices and beliefs related to mathematics. Our findings reveal that teachers' on-the-job interactions during the first year of reform predicted changes in their instructional practices; further, these changes were associated with the infrastructures that local school systems created to support teacher learning in mathematics. Teachers' participation in formal professional development, in contrast, predicted changes in their instructional beliefs, but not their practices. These findings have implications for future efforts to design formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities that support ambitious educational reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the outcomes of a ‘lesson study’ project conducted in a mathematics department with four serving teachers in a secondary school in England. Using Dudley’s lesson study framework and drawing on Hargreaves and Fullan’s notion of professional capital, the feasibility and value of collaborative lesson study as a vehicle for the development of teacher learning were explored. Planning and evaluation meetings as well as end-of-project interviews were analysed to investigate how teachers planned research lessons together and how these were evaluated. Despite time constraints, teachers who engaged in lesson study reported that the process improved understanding of their students; that collaboration helped them to develop less-teacher-centred approaches and created a stronger sense of teacher community. The project demonstrated that lesson study has potential as an alternative or complementary model of teachers’ learning, but it also throws up substantive organisational challenges if its use is to expand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]