CONTEXTUALIZING TEACHER EDUCATION AND LESSON STUDY IN THE UNITED STATES

Around the world, teacher educators have called for teacher education to be practice-based to better prepare novices to enter the classroom and increase the likelihood of retention across the career span. Lesson study is one mechanism for responding to this need for increased attention to practice within teacher education, as it attends to planning, rehearsal, enactment, and evaluation of instructional effectiveness. Yet, all teacher education pathways in the United States are not identical. In this chapter, we overview the array of mechanisms through which a person can become a certified elementary or secondary science or mathematics teacher in the US context. In so doing, we discuss the multitude of field placements, methods courses, and certification requirements that contribute to a landscape of teacher education that is varied and thus requires localized adaptation to lesson study. We then link this variability in teacher education contexts to broad variations in lesson study practices within teacher education to frame the subsequent chapters that will support readers’ understandings of the lesson study components and examples of lesson study in teacher education. We link those roots to current practices, as revealed from overviewing lesson study publications from the past 20 years.