Professional development in practice: exploring how lesson study unfolds in schools through the lens of organizational routines

Although lesson study is increasingly adopted in the Netherlands, it remains difficult for schools to implement and maintain the initiative. How can you organize lesson study successfully in your own high school?
In this dissertation, this question is explored through the concept of organizational routines. As a first step, we reviewed the use of concept of organizational routines to examine educational initiatives in practice. Insights from this review study are used to see if and how schools implement and perform lesson study. Firstly, we focused on how teachers’ understanding of lesson study connects to their performance and evaluation of the initiative. Second, we looked at how schools (successfully) set-up organizational tasks and processes to organize lesson study, such as scheduling, recruiting participants, and giving credit for teachers’ time-investment. Lastly, we directed our attention to which school factors promote or inhibit implementing lesson study. Factors such as part-timers, turnover, scheduling, school improvement policy, and scheduling were reported to be very influential. This dissertation shows that the ‘organizational space’ schools have to organize lesson study varies and it provides leads for schools how they can increase that space.