On Day 2, there were opportunities to attend a range of Symposiums, Round Table discussions and Workshops. In addition there was an Open Forum which considered the development of Lesson Study in a range of contexts and a Poster Session enabling delegates to discuss implementation with practitioners from many countries..
The Symposium entitled: High Quality Learning : Approaches from Lesson Studies, involved presenters from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan and examined the factors contributing to qualitative differences in and impact on student learning. A further symposium examined ‘ The role of a professional learning community in an era of managerial and testing accountability.’
An Open Forum session ‘Lesson Studies in the Japanese context’ contained inputs from both USA and Japan, focusing on the original Japanese model and the ways in which this has been implemented and developed in Japan and beyond.
An important element of the WALS conferences is the mix of academics and practising teachers, with the workshops in particular providing opportunities to hear directly from those teachers. In total there were 31 parallel workshops available, each with 4 or 5 short sessions, thus providing an enormous range of subjects but all with a Lesson Study element and making it very difficult to select those of most interest – there were easily enough to extend into a third day
Sessions sampled included presentations by :
- teachers from St Andrew’s Primary School, Singapore, entitled : Teaching students to use writing rubric for self-assessment;
- A Pre-School teacher from Spain, supported by staff from the University of Malaga and by Angelika Kullberg( University of Gothenburg) entitled : What is critical for pupils’ learning of fractions and what does a critical feature entail?
- A graduate student of Kyushu University, Japan entitled: ‘What is Lesson Analysis by Children’
- A lecturer from the University of Saga, Japan entitled’ Curriculum Management and Lesson Study’,
- Teachers from Da Qiao primary School, Singapore entitled ‘Reforming Social Studies in a Fun Way’