Lesson study communities on web to support teacher collaboration for professional development

Abstract

This paper addresses how the peer review system (FD Commons on WEB) was used as an analytical tool to identify key principles and criteria for assessing teaching and learning in higher education. The focus of this study was to understand various reviewers' viewpoints of educational events during "lesson study" by examining type of knowledge shared by reviewers. We present the overview of our Peer Review Process Project and report on five pilot studies conducted during spring term 2009. The successive trials revealed the following three points: (1) the lecture summary content differed between reviewers depending on specialty and teaching experience, (2) reviewers wrote more comments concerning lecture quality than basic teaching skills, (3) as keywords for self-reflection, lecturers used content information rather than pedagogical points. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.