We are interested in some features of teachers’ discourse in Lesson Study meetings based on their findings during class observations. What kinds of topics are discussed there? What aspects of instruction do they emphasize? What kind of students do they talk about? By identifying these features we hope to find a way to improve Lesson Study meetings so that they will become a true learning experience for teachers. In Japan all schools hold their own Lesson Study meetings once a month or several times a term in one form or another. Recently it has been pointed out that Lesson Study meetings have been too formalized and teachers have felt they are learning less and less. How does the experience through Lesson Study meetings function as Teacher Education? Do the teachers discuss specific matters observed in a particular class? Or do they talk about some abstract topics removed from real observations? Unfortunately, the latter is often the case, and these meetings have been a sort of burden to them. Many researchers in Japan think the form and the content of Lesson Study should be reformed. For our collaborative action research, we are focusing on one primary school which is changing their way of Lesson Study. We obtained permission from this school to observe several classes along with the teachers and to take part in their Lesson Study discussions held after the classes. As to the way the discussions should be coordinated, we made suggestions, consulting with the leaders of the Lesson Study committee. Through this research we aim to find out what conditions are required and how researchers should behave in Lesson Study settings so that teachers can conduct their Lesson Study autonomously and productively. To identify the conditions, we made 3 dimensions of matrices: 1. Relevance of the person/persons referred to in an utterance; 2. Degree of child-centeredness; 3. Types of topics. By analyzing these matrices we can find out whether or not autonomous learning by teachers occurs in Lesson Study meetings. As our theoretical framework we adopted the Self-Determination Theory by Desi and Ryan, the theory of collegiality as explicated in Learning to Teach in Community by Darling-Hammond, and the action research theory of Lesson Study by Catherine Lewis.

The entire debate of the Lesson Study meetings was recorded and videotaped and then analyzed using the method of Discourse Analysis. We are constructing categories and matrices on many levels on the basis of this analysis. These categories and matrices will then be applied to a variety of further analyses, such as comparing schools and extracting features of discourse among teachers in more general settings. We'll also interview some of the teachers who participated in the meetings and ask them to evaluate the success of the meetings to see the correlation between their self-evaluation of learning through the meetings and the discourse features extracted by the analyses.

By using the above-mentioned matrices, we can point to the features of teachers’ discourse when Lesson Study meetings are successful. We can show that in Lesson Study meetings teachers learn a lot more as practitioners when their discussion revolves around their direct observations and when it is more child-centered. We can also identify some patterns and conditions that will encourage teachers to attend Lesson Study meetings and to learn autonomously through them. We believe that our research will be of help to teachers and researchers in Europe and elsewhere as it will show the importance of collective learning by teachers which adds to their expertise and improves their daily instruction.