The goal of this presentation is to discuss an on-going study on how Japanese public school teachers promote students’ non-cognitive development in the context of their academic lessons and how lesson study contribute to the development.
Across the world, lesson study has become a popular methodology of teacher professional development, but it has tendency to focus on enhancing students’ academic performance as its ultimate goal. However, it is not well-known that in Japan, lesson study dialogues often encompass how to promote students’ non-cognitive development in the context of academic teaching.
Historically speaking, Japanese public education has pursued three domains of human development—intellectual development, socio-emotional development and mental and physical strengths called 知徳体(chi-toku-tai) in Japanese. The Japanese national education law stipulates that the goal of education is to promote students’ whole person development, and public schools in Japan set their school goals in the ways that reflect this policy such as “Becoming smarter, kinder and stronger” and “Learning to become a caring, stronger and wiser person”. Accordingly, Japanese public school teachers make efforts to promote students’ whole person development in the context of their academic teaching (Kajita, 2016; Lewis, 1995).
In recent years, studies report that students’ non-cognitive abilities such as social skills, self-regulation and self-efficacy predict future success of students (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). There have been many attempts to incorporate this aspect of learning in educational practices across the world, but long before this trend, Japanese public education has encompassed students’ social-emotional learning as a part of its goals. Consequently, Japanese lesson study has served an arena not only to consider how to promote students’ academic learning but also to cultivate students’ non-cognitive, social-emotional learning. The question is how this is actually done in Japanese public schools.
This study attempts to answer the following research questions:
1) How do Japanese teachers actually create opportunities for students’ non-cognitive learning in their academic teaching?
2) How does Japanese lesson study contribute to acquiring the expertise according to expert teachers?