How lesson study develops pre-service teacher’s instructional design competency?

This paper aims to examine how Lesson Study of an initial teacher education course develops the instructional design competency of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong. Lesson Study is a collaborative action research approach for developing teacher professional competency. This study assesses the effectiveness of the Lesson Study course conducted in a teacher education institute that based on a quasi-experimental design. There were 341 pre-service teachers participated to a questionnaire survey. Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability test were used to confirm the constructed validity and reliability of the survey instrument. Canonical correlation was applied to explore the relationship between the approaches of their learning process and their learning outcomes. Results show that action research tutorials and collaborative practice are predictors of their instructional design skills and teaching competency. This paper discusses the critical success factors and the potential for using Lesson Study as a model to help pre-service teachers develop their teaching competency.