A Case Study Of Teacher Professional Development Through Lesson Study In Junior Middle School

The New English Curriculum Standard (2011) points out teacher professional development is the key to effective implementation of the English Curriculum. Teachers should actively share and exchange ideas with others through cooperative learning and exploration to improve their teaching skills and help student with autonomic learning so as to become teachers with creative thinking and reflective consciousness.Over-viewing the teacher professional development models, there is usually a gap between the theoretical training and the actual teaching practice. However, Lesson Study provides a new perspective for the optimization of the classroom teaching and teachers’ professional development, which was originated in Japan in the1960s, and widely spread to the United States and other countries in the1990s. It is a teacher-led instructional improvement cycle that involves a group of teachers working together to plan, conduct, observe, reflect on the evidence gathered during the lesson to evaluate and refine a "research lesson". It is regarded as an effective way of teacher professional development. However, Lesson Study in middle schools in China is still in the exploratory stage and it mainly focuses on the optimizing of effective teaching as well as teacher growth but ignores the inner professional development of teachers, which is the key element of professional development.This study theoretically discusses the effects of Lesson Study on junior middle school English teachers’ professional development from the perspective of positive psychology and social constructivism.The study also constructs "CTEETA" mode of Lesson Study conform to English teaching in junior schools in China on the basis of the of domestic and foreign research. Meanwhile, in order to further explore how Lesson Study promote English teachers’professional development in junior school and whether "CTEETA" mode is suitable for middle school English teaching, this study adopts qualitative research method, takes the key junior school the author works in as a research field, and focuses on the research theme of training students’ Self-study, with8English teachers involved as the research objects in one semester as a case study.The results of the study show that: CTEETA model can effectively optimize classroom teaching and improve students’self-study; Lesson Study can promote teacher professional development, especially the knowledge basis of teachers’professional development--the practical knowledge; meanwhile, teachers’ optimistic and confident work attitude is formed and teachers’professional happiness has also been improved through Lesson Study.This study, by exploring the specific Lesson Study mode in junior middle school English teaching, does not have its own characteristics as a case study, but also has general reference to further study in this field. The findings of this study are significant and inductive to teacher professional development. Based on the major findings of the study, some suggestions are offered not only for teachers but also for schools.