Lesson Study is drawing worldwide attention in terms of teachers’ effective learning and development. Japanese-style Lesson Study is taken special note of by Lewis(2004) and others, but the way Lesson Study is conducted in Japan is not uniform and the best has not necessarily been introduced to the outside world. The role university or college researchers should play in Lesson Study, in particular, has not been given sufficient consideration. According to Kage(2002), there are two types of researcher involvement in Lesson Study: 1.Top-down guidance and 2.Consultation as facilitators. In top-down guidance, Lesson Study loses momentum when researchers leave, whereas in Lesson Consultation, it tends to be sustainable since Consultation supports teachers’ autonomy. In Lesson Consultation, the basic attitude of researchers is to participate in Lesson Study as equal partners and avoid creating situations where they take control and only their remarks are paid due attention to. At ECER2009(Vienna), Fujimoto et al. already proposed Participant-driven Lesson Study as a way to enhance teachers’ autonomous learning and development and to enable their empowerment. Here ‘Lesson Participants’ refer to the teachers and learners of particular lessons observed. Participant-driven Lesson Study bases its theoretical background on Professional Learning Community Theory by Darling-Hammond et al.(2005) and Roberts et al.(2003), Self-determination Theory by Deci and Ryan(2002), and the development of Reflection Tool by Kage(2003) It can be defined as collaborative action research where reflection is prompted through discussions centering on Lesson Participants(, hence “Participant-driven” Lesson Study). Teacher empowerment through this approach can be confirmed by the heightening of their awareness of the importance of active participation in the process of Lesson Study and of the quantity and the quality of their utterances during the Lesson Study discussions. Instances where teachers passively listen to researchers or discuss abstract topics unrelated to observed facts are often seen in Lesson Study conferences even in Japan, and this lack of Participant-drivenness is mainly due to the fact that researchers engage in Lesson Study in type I manner, from which no teacher empowerment can be attained. In this presentation, the effectiveness of Lesson Consultation will be showcased on the basis of a collaborative action research conducted with an elementary school. We examined how teacher empowerment is enhanced through researchers’ involvement as Lesson Consultants by analyzing the proceedings of their Lesson Study meetings after class observations and the quantity and the quality of the attendees’ utterances at the meetings. We also analyzed the teachers’ self-evaluation as an indicator of the effectiveness of Participant-driven Lesson Study. By creating a consensus with the school that the classes under discussion and the teachers instructing the classes should be the focus of Lesson Study and the teachers deserve more respect and should be listened to as practitioners during the discussion, we verified that the teachers were encouraged to speak out more freely and as a result an autonomous interpretation of lessons appropriate to the venue emerges from among them. This enhancement of teachers’ autonomy is teacher empowerment.

We obtained permission from an elementary school to conduct class observations and to take part along with the teachers in Lesson Study discussions thereafter. We tape-recorded the entire debate of all the six conferences after class observations which were held over the period of eight months, and conducted a discourse analysis. Using the coding system we introduced at ECER2009, we made visible the Participant-drivenness, or the Degree of Participation, of each utterance of the speakers at the conferences. This time, paying special attention to the discourse of university or college researchers, we compared the two types of researcher involvement mentioned above and examined how their discourse differs. In addition, at the end of the school year, we conducted an interview and a questionnaire survey with each of the teachers and compared the results with his/her reflections from the previous year.

Teachers’ discourse at Lesson Study sessions will be found to be more Participant-driven when university or college researchers engage in Lesson Study as Lesson Consultants than when they give teachers top-down guidance, and this proves that Lesson Consultation enhances teachers’ autonomous empowerment. Through this research it has become clear that when outside researchers function as a catalyst for encouraging Participant-drivennness among teachers, an environment is generated where teachers can autonomously reflect on their own practice in an effective manner, and this provides a way for teachers to further their expertise and professionalism within their own venue.