Culturally crafted Lesson Study to improve teachers’ professional development in mathematics: a case study in Italian secondary school

This paper describes a Lesson Study in which in-service mathematics secondary-school teachers, collaborating with researchers, involve grade 10 students in tessellation problems. The data are collected by an experiment carried out in the context of the “Liceo Matematico” project, with three volunteer teachers. The experiment goal was to craft a collaborative design of the research lesson between teachers and researchers. The research aim of the paper is to examine the use of Lesson Study in the institutional and cultural context of Italian secondary school with the use of Cultural Transposition as a theoretical framework. The research is qualitative with idiographic aims, based on video research. The educational aim of the research is to provide a solid basis for a revamped in-service teacher education first in the context of the project, then in curricular context. Semiotic mediation is used to provide, within Lesson Study, the conceptual framework for teachers and researchers collaborative design of the research lesson. The results show that Lesson Study, as a foreign practice, is an opportunity for teachers to confront their teaching practices, to enrich their professional development, resulting in more awareness on their didactical action in and outside the classroom.