Some critical issues posed by ‘Theory and Practice of Lesson Study in Mathematics’ from a Western Perspective

This paper constitutes an attempt to produce a critical commentary on this volume that is informed by a ‘classroom action research’ tradition, which originated in the work of Lawrence Stenhouse and others at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia in England. It involved a series of projects, which engaged groups of ‘teachers as researchers’ in their classrooms, and stimulated the development of a research tradition that impacted across the UK and Europe and more widely in the latter part of the 20th century. The paper begins with a summary of the main ideas embedded in this tradition of collaborative classroom action research, and then goes on to discuss in their light a number of themes and issues posed by contributions in this volume. These include the respective roles of academic experts and teachers in the lesson study process, the role of teachers in constructing accounts of lesson studies and creating ‘knowledge platforms’, the role of teachers as researchers in relation to curriculum development, the use of learning theories to inform lesson study, and the problem of globalizing lesson study methodology across cultures and systems

Organizational Structure and Process—An Analysis in Decision-Making

It is known that the performance of an organization is highly related to the process through which activities are organized. However, the dyadic relationship between organizational structure and process along with their influence on performance become complicated when faced with complex activities. We explore this relationship and its influence by following three lines of study. First of all, in a setting of product development, we introduce a process model for organizing concurrent activities. We show how to determine an optimal schedule. The results demonstrate the variation of design performance, i.e., lead-time, rework, and total workload, under a set of different overlapping strategies. Although depending on the setting of case incidences, there generally exists no dominant strategy over all the performance measures. As a result, managers should select the strategy based on preference over the measures. Secondly, we address the question of how should an organization be structured in a static as well as dynamic process variation. Organizational form will be changed along two dimensions, i.e., departmentalization and assignment, whereas process evolves in terms of complexity. In addition to improving the alignment of organizational structure with a static process, we emphasize and study strategic guidelines of restructuring in the presence of a dynamic environment. The last line of study is geared towards evaluating a group of organizations which differ in preference. In the form of decision process, team specialty, and communication structure, we show the comparative performance between two stylized decision processes, i.e., hierarchy and polyarchy, with or without communication between agents in an environment where each project must be determined by two features