The papers in this symposium report findings from the “Learning from Lessons” project, currently being conducted in Australia, Portugal and the USA. The major premise of this project is that teachers learn from the act of teaching a lesson and from the activities associated with planning the lesson and the process of reflecting on the taught lesson for the purpose of planning a subsequent lesson. From this perspective, we hypothesise that one important aspect of teacher learning is the iterative and incremental process associated with the ongoing practice of teaching sequences of lessons. This proposal resonates with Shulman’s (1986) conception of the “wisdom of practice”, in which teacher expertise is seen as developing through instructional activity. Our motivation in undertaking both the project and this symposium is the desire to facilitate teacher learning. If, in fact, significant teacher learning occurs through the daily practice of preparing and teaching lessons, then an understanding of that process would be likely to assist in the promotion of teacher learning.

We are working towards a model of teacher in-the-moment decision-making that connects with ideas of professionally situated learning (Berliner, 2001). Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) offered a model connecting “classroom experimentation” to changes in teacher knowledge and beliefs. The mediating agent in this model is the domain labelled “salient outcomes.” Teacher learning is shaped by prior knowledge and by those things considered by the teacher as sufficiently salient to constitute objects of the teacher’s attention. Our thinking is informed by the work of Van Es and Sherin (2002), who have developed a substantial body of research on “teacher noticing”). Related work on decision-making by Schoenfeld (2011) can be usefully integrated with the idea of “adaptive expertise” (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986) to extend the Clarke-Hollingsworth model, by providing a mechanism for both reflection and enaction within a model of teacher learning.

Artzt and Armour-Thomas (1999) identified “dimensions” of the lesson (Tasks, Learning Environment, and Discourse) as “those broad aspects of instructional practice that define critical areas of teachers’ work during the enactment of the lesson” (p. 214). Their framework was used to create the experimental lesson plans used in this study. We also drew upon the literature of effective teaching of mathematics (Sullivan, 2011). Implementation of these experimental lesson plans provides rich learning experiences for the participating students and, we suggest, similarly rich experiences to support the professional learning of the teacher.

Pragmatically, the “Learning from Lessons” research project takes as its entry point the need for detailed documentation and analysis of the process of learning experienced by teachers in three different countries in the course of their preparation and teaching of actual lessons. In this symposium, the first paper reports the project research design and examines some of the underlying assumptions. The second paper, reports the findings from the Australian implementation of stage one of the study design, focusing on the connection between teacher prior knowledge and teacher selective attention. Paper 3 reports the analysis of one Portuguese teacher’s learning as evidenced in the preparation and delivery of two consecutive lessons: one provided by the project team and the second devised by the teacher to build on the first lesson.

In combination, the presentations illustrate the capacity of the research design to reveal aspects of the process of teacher professional learning related to prior knowledge, selective attention, decision-making, and reflection. As the project develops, international comparative analyses will be employed to highlight distinctive features of teacher professional learning in the classroom settings found in the participating countries.

Artzt, A. F., & Armour-Thomas, E. (1999). A cognitive model for examining teachers’ instructional practice in mathematics: A guide for facilitating teacher reflection. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 40, 211-235. Berliner, D. C. (2001). Learning about and learning from expert teachers. International Journal of Educational Research, 35(5), 463-482. Clarke, D. J., & Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 947-967. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In H. Stevenson, H. Azuma, & K. Hakuta (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Company. Schoenfeld, A. H. (2011). How we think: A theory of goal-oriented decision making and its educational applications. New York, NY: Routledge. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14. Sullivan, P. (2011). Teaching mathematics: Using research-informed strategies. Australian Education Review, 59. Camberwell, Victoria: Australian Council for Educational Research. Van Es, E., & Sherin, M. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571-596.