An Activity for Building Teaching Potential Designed on Community of Practice Cooperated with Lesson Study

Abstract

This paper proposes the development of an activity based on the community of practice (CoP) approach in collaboration with lesson study to enhance teaching potential. The CoP approach is utilized to elicit teachers' experiences and facilitate the sharing of teaching guidelines, while the lesson study method enables small groups of teachers to collaboratively design, teach, reflect on, and refine a class lesson. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, documentation, expert field notes, and focus groups, the proposed activity consists of four key components: 1) principle, 2) activity objective, 3) learning activity, and 4) learning evaluation. The learning activity encompasses four steps: educating, innovating, implementing, and reflecting. Each step comprises several sub-activities, with the innovating and implementing steps being iterative. The activity demonstrates a content validity of 0.95 and a suitability rating of 4.88. Furthermore, the participating teachers in this study exhibit increased self-confidence in constructing classroom activities and gained additional pathways for designing effective learning activities. The paper suggests that this approach can effectively foster the acquisition of new knowledge, the development of innovative practices, and the application of effective instructional strategies in the classroom.