Effects of Procedural Scaffolding on In-Service Teachers’ Peer Feedback Quality and Learning Participation in Lesson Study

Online Lesson study is an important form of promoting teacher professional development, with the help of the online learning platform. During a lesson study cycle, teachers cooperatively set goals for professional and student learning, plan a lesson around these goals, modify, teach, observe, analyze, reflect jointly and share thoughts about the revised version of the lesson. Teachers could obtain lots of feedback from peers in the process of online lesson study. However, some teachers often get lost and cannot effectively participate in the activities of online lesson study. What’s more, some teachers lack sufficient expertise to provide high-quality feedback on another peer’s teaching. To address these issues, this study proposed a procedural scaffolding to assist teachers in improving the quality of peer feedback comments and learning participation behaviors in a lesson study context. Sixty primary school in-service teachers participated in the lesson study carried out at an online lesson study platform. Their peer feedback contents and participation behaviors generated during the lesson study were collected and analyzed to examine the effects of the proposed approach. The results showed positive effects of the procedural scaffolding on enhancing teachers’ quality of peer feedback contents and learning participation in online lesson study.