Deyeloping Teacher Identity In Lesson Study

Teacher identity concerns how a teacher regards himself in context of school; and construction of teacher identity is a dynamic and continuous process, running through professional teacher development. Lesson study is a new approach to professional development of teachers, which, aiming to promote students’learning, is a cyclical process of collaborative planning, class teaching and observing, analytic reflection, and ongoing revision among teachers and external experts. This study is aimed to explore the nature and change of primary school English teachers’identity in context of lesson study.The study, as a qualitative research which is the increasingly prevailing approach in social science study, adopted case study and narrative inquiry as the major methods. The study objects were three female English teachers from Bo Ai Primary School in Changzhou, The author, engaged in the whole process of the lesson study project as ethnographic researcher, collected data through in-depth interview, classroom observation, teacher reflection journals, lesson plans, E-mail and QQ chat. With the data of such richness the author describes the three teachers’performance in lesson study in great detail, probing into how the teachers’ professional identity was constructed and changed. From the three case stories we draw the following conclusions:Firstly, multiplicity of teacher identity has been well presented in this research. We can hardly say a teacher has singular identity. The three teachers perceived and manifested themselves in lesson study as a variety of professing beings such as instructor, learner, researcher.Secondly, teachers’self-understanding frames their way of going about classroom teaching including their study about teaching and their aspiration of career development. The whole process of lesson study project in Bo Ai School witnessed how the three teachers’ action manifested their self-concept.Thirdly, variability is an essential feature of teacher identity. The formation of identity is a dynamic process, which changes over time and in different settings.Finally, three main factors were found in this lesson study project influencing teacher identity formation and development.1) Teachers’personal background and their personalities.2) Contexts in which teachers work, including community culture, interpersonal relationship, cooperativeness and ways of communication or discursive manner.3) The role of external experts as scaffold and expert-teacher relationship.