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Ángel Ignacio PÉREZ GÓMEZ, Encarnación SOTO GÓMEZ, and M.ª José SERVÁN NÚÑEZ. Interuniversity Review of Teacher Training. ISSN: 0213-8646 emipal@unizar.es. University Association of Teacher Training Spain.

ABSTRACTThis article aims to show the promising relationship between the processes generated by Lesson Studies (LS) and the development of practical thinking in teacher training (1). To this end, we propose to broaden the focus of LS from improving practice to reconstructing and improving teachers’ practical knowledge. As a central point of analysis, we focus the debate on the relationship between practical knowledge—generally unconscious—and the practical thinking we use to describe and justify practice. Among the main findings derived from this research, we have discovered that the mere elaboration of new conscious and informed ideas (theorization of practice) is not enough to transform action; we also need to reconstruct underlying attitudes, habits, and beliefs through the systematic incorporation and repetition of new practices and new ways of doing (experimentation of theory). Lesson Study cycles become a privileged tool in initial and ongoing training by linking teachers’ professional development with curriculum experimentation and cooperative self-training (Stenhouse, 1975).

KEYWORDS: Teacher Training, Lesson Study, Practical Thinking, Practical Knowledge, Theories in Use.

ABSTRACT.This paper aims to show the promising relationship between the processes generated by Lesson Study (LS) and the development of practical thinking in teacher training. We propose broadening the focus of Lesson Study from improving practice to reconstructing and improving the practical knowledge of teachers. The core issue of the analysis is the discussion on the relationship between practical knowledge, which is mostly unconscious, and practical thinking, which we use to describe and justify practice. One of the main findings of this research is that simply developing new conscious and informed ideas (theorising practice) does not suffice to transform the action; we also need to reconstruct the most internal attitudes, habits and beliefs through systematically including and repeating new practices and methods (experimentation of the theory). Lesson Study cycles become an exceptional tool in pre-service and in-service teacher training, because they link teachers’ professional development with curricular experimentation and cooperative self-training (Stenhouse, 1975).

KEYWORDS: Teacher training, Lesson Study, Practical thinking, Practical knowledge, Theories in use.

Practical thinking and practical knowledge

We share teacher training programs and curricula with a strong academic bias. Most of them do not foster the development of practical thinking, the core of teachers’ professional competencies, and deepen the gap between theory and practice, that is, between the declared theories of each student or teacher and their theories in use, those knowledges and strategies they put into action when they are in the classroom setting (Zeichner, 2010; Pérez Gómez, 2010; Hammerness, Darling-Hammong, Bransford, Berliner, Cochran-Smith, Mcdonald and Zeichner, 2005, Elliott, 2012). 

Schön’s (1998) distinction between “reflection on action” and “knowledge in action,” Korthagen’s contributions on the formation of informed Gestalts (2010), as well as the most recent discoveries from cognitive neuroscience research (Damasio, 2010) lead us to investigate the conscious and unconscious dimensions—knowledges, skills, emotions, attitudes, and values—involved in the way the teachers we have collaborated with perceive, interpret, make decisions, and act in the complex scenario of classroom interactions. Do LS help to unveil and, if necessary, reconstruct the more implicit components of teachers’ knowledge in action?

In our opinion, understanding these complex processes requires clarifying the meaning, limits, and interactions between two concepts that are normally confused: practical thinking and practical knowledge.

For the development of our research, we have defined practical knowledge, or knowledge in action, as the set of beliefs, skills, values, attitudes, and emotions that operate automatically, implicitly, without the need for consciousness, and that condition our perception, interpretation, decision-making, and actions. Practical thinking, however, includes knowledge in action plus reflective knowledge about action. That is, it is constituted by all the resources (conscious and unconscious) that we humans use when we try to understand, design, and intervene in a specific situation in personal or professional life.

Practical knowledge: a starting point

Practical knowledge, as a repertoire of images, maps, or artifacts that carry information, logical associations, and emotional connotations (Pérez Gómez, 2010a), is holistic,2 emergent, functional, unconscious,3 emotional, and intuitive. Its implicit and automatic nature is not understood as irrational, incoherent, or ineffective, but rather as plural and disorganized, giving rise to multiple selves and orientations that are not always convergent. However, few individuals, including teachers, are aware of the nature of the practical knowledge we activate in each specific situation. This knowledge, better or worse founded and organized about our own multiple identities, about others, and about the context, acts as a platform for decisions and actions that are often contradictory to the theories we explicitly state to explain the orientation of our behavior (Zanting, Verloop, Vermunt, and Van Driel, 1998). This is a distance that we generally observe better in the practice of others than in our own, precisely because of its emotional and unconscious nature. Thus, Argyris (1993) highlights the need to differentiate between “theories in use” and “espoused theories,” understanding that theories in use have been acquired throughout personal and professional history, are part of our long and scarcely questioned teaching culture, and are shaped by functional automatisms as well as many pedagogical myths and errors, which contribute to fossilizing our way of acting (Pozo, 2014). Therefore, it is essential to attend to and emphasize the importance of intuition and emergent meanings, which are so frequently forgotten and yet permeate practical knowledge (Tardif, 2004; Van Manen, 1995; Korthagen, 2005, 2010; Lampert, 2010; Inmordino-Yang, 2011; Hagger and Hazel, 2006).

On the other hand, it is worth highlighting, following Argyris (1993) and Hammerness and Shulman (2006), that the personal and professional effectiveness of each individual is related to the degree of coherence they are able to achieve between these two “theoretical” devices – espoused theories and theories-in-use – and there is no doubt that a poor relationship between the two implies high doses of dysfunctionality in interpretation and action. Frequently, as Eraut (1994) points out, explicit language, the espoused theory, does not describe the practice but is rather a defense or rationalization of it. Therefore, when researching teachers’ practical knowledge, it will be essential to enrich the shared knowledge from interviews with teachers with the knowledge derived from the observation and analysis of their actions in the classroom. It therefore seems necessary, from the perspective of initial and ongoing teacher training, to broaden the research focus to identify the dominant meanings of teachers’ practical knowledge and, in particular, the axes of meaning that condition their specific and priority orientation (Pérez Gómez, 2012; Pozo, 2014).

From Knowledge to Practical Thinking. Theorizing Practice and Experiencing Theory

Living and building an educational experience requires the permanent and cyclical transition from knowledge to practical thinking. Therefore, being a teacher will require programs and strategies that help create the most flexible, open, and powerful integration between these two structures, where reflection, understood as informed awareness, will be key for this practical knowledge to become practical thinking.

Theorizing practice

The formation of teachers’ practical thinking requires us to re-know ourselves, that is, to understand what explicit and implicit resources nourish and condition us. To stimulate this process, we need to identify and understand our own models, frameworks, and implicit and personal theories for interpreting reality (Pozo 2014; Polanyi and Prosh, 1975), in relation to the deepest core of our beliefs and their complex identity (Korthagen, 2005) within a context of lived experience (Grimmet and Mackinnon, 1992). Ignoring this relationship can turn our theories into mere ornaments, useful in any case for rhetorical justification or for passing exams, but sterile for governing action in the complex, changing, uncertain, and urgent situations of the classroom.

This process, termed by Schön (1998) reflection-on-action and by Hagger and Hazel (2006) Practical Theorizing, theorizing practice, involves provoking and stimulating teachers to identify, analyze, and reformulate not only the espoused theories that adorn our rhetoric, but also the theories-in-use that govern our practice. A practice that must review, analyze, and question the habits, attitudes, values, and emotions that are activated and conditioned in the complex and daily professional experience in contrast with other professionals and other practices (Franke and Chan, 2007). In this way, personal and professional meanings are permanently constructed and reconstructed from personal experiences and validated through discussion with others. In summary, theorizing practice should involve the teacher’s reflection on their own practice, on their own way of acting, in light of the most relevant educational experiences and the most consistent educational research results.

Experiencing theory

However, reflection “on” action, theorizing practice, is not the same as practical thinking. The key step that, in our opinion, Korthagen, Loughran, and Russell (2006) introduce regarding Schön’s (1998) thinking is the relevance they give to the complementary process of converting new personal theories into concrete, sustainable, and agile ways of interpretation and action, that is, the experimentation of theory. This movement implies the construction or, rather, the reconstruction of our teaching competencies, those that we automatically activate when faced with new actions and new contexts. It therefore requires giving more relevance to experience, practice, and the experimentation of new ways of perceiving, designing, making decisions, relating, and acting; without remaining solely in the analysis of our practical knowledge. It involves both the reconstruction of representations and the transformation of the dimensions and peculiarities that underpin our actions. Practical thinking, therefore, undoubtedly requires the convergence of both complementary movements: theorizing practice and experimenting with new theory.

The dimensions of practical thinking

In our research on the development of practical thinking through Lesson Studies (Pérez Gómez, Soto, and Serván, 2010; Soto, Serván, Peña, and Pérez Gómez, 2013), we have used the following theoretical framework to make explicit and analyze five dimensions that constitute the system we have called practical knowledge and thinking: knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and emotions (figure 2).

In order not to lose the continuity and permanent interaction that these components manifest in life in the representation, they are represented in a continuous interval where, at one end, the most clearly cognitive and abstract processes are located, and at the other, the most clearly emotional ones. Let’s look at each of them:

• Knowledge. It is clear that without knowledge there would be no thought or capacity for effective intervention.4 Beyond mere information, data, dates, names, formulas, etc., we understand knowledge as the integration of information into schemes, models, maps, scripts that say something about external or internal reality. They are systems of associations that help us read the world around us, design our intervention, and foresee the consequences of a course of action (Taber, 2006; Pérez Gómez, 2012). We call beliefs the less conscious, less explicit, less contrasted and questioned associations that, nevertheless, are relevant to the individual or group and show strong resistance to change and reconstruction.
• Skills and abilities. They refer to knowing how to do. There are different types of skills and strategies: heuristic, semi-heuristic, algorithmic… related to psychomotor, social, or mental domains. All of them are usually called procedural knowledge and are constructions acquired at different moments of evolutionary development, with different levels of consciousness, which tend to become automated to ensure the functional economy of the brain (Pozo, 2014). The usual, routine ways of perception, decision-making, and intervention are called habits or habitus and are resources of an automatic and fundamentally unconscious nature. All conscious thought, repeated over time, can become an invisible mental program, a belief no longer questioned that conditions perception, decision-making, and action. Focusing only on the development of skills is as myopic as focusing exclusively on knowledge, because a competent and autonomous person needs and uses knowledge and skills.
• Values. They constitute the principles, axes of meaning, understanding, and action that we consider valuable in our personal or professional lives. They provide us with guidelines for formulating personal or collective goals and purposes. They are resources that powerfully condition our ways of understanding, perceiving, interpreting, acting, etc., and therefore reflect our most important interests, feelings, and convictions (Jiménez, 2008). Obviously, values, both reactive and proactive (Wells and Claxton, 2002), involve knowledge and are closely related to emotions.
• Attitudes. Understood as dispositions to perceive and act in a certain way, they are usually formed through experience, relationships, etc., closely linked to emotions and habits. Eiser (1999) defines them as learned predispositions to respond consistently to a social object in specific environments. There are desired, conscious, chosen attitudes; there are learned attitudes; and there are attitudes that we are almost unaware of and that influence and act below the level of consciousness.
• Emotions. These are primitive and/or evolved tendencies of acceptance or rejection, of approach, paralysis, or flight in response to stimuli and contexts. We can say that emotions are at the beginning and end of all projects and all decision-making mechanisms. In this regard, following Damasio (2010) and Tizón (2011), a distinction could be made between emotions and feelings. The six basic emotions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and joy) are bodily, reflexive, unconscious reactions triggered by the perception of a stimulus. Feelings (shame, love, guilt, jealousy, pride, etc.) are the perceptions we experience when the organism is already aware of the emotions. While emotions are unconscious, systematic, and reflexive, feelings are the conscious perceptions of these unconscious emotions.
  
  The educational management of emotions is a clear value today, as we cannot conceive of life apart from them. They are the reference base that serves either as platforms or as filters for all other dimensions.

In summary, we can understand that knowledge consists of simpler or more complex associations between stimuli, between ideas, etc.; skills are also associations, not of representational components, but of procedures; values are the purposes, the axes of meaning that we highlight from the previous two components; attitudes are predispositions to act based on values and situations, and emotions are personal somatic reactions to situations.

All these elements are present both in declarative knowledge, which has traditionally occupied the content of pedagogical debates, and in knowledge in use. Deepening the relationships of convergence and discrepancy between explicit thought or proclaimed theories and theories in use, as well as investigating the potential of LS as a methodological tool for the autonomous and cooperative identification, contrast, and reformulation of these, in early childhood education teachers, has been the focus of our research project in recent years. The conceptual framework we have just presented has been both the source of inspiration and the result of it. It has been configured as an essential conceptual platform for identifying teachers’ resistances and difficulties in understanding the theoretical representations and the mostly implicit practical mechanisms that govern our ways of teaching. As can be seen in some examples that we provide below and more extensively in the article by Peña, Becerra, Rodríguez, Suárez, and García in this special issue, a large part of the potential and difficulties we have encountered are not located in strictly cognitive and explicit aspects (knowledge and skills), but in the implicit dimensions that belong to the realm of subjective dispositions: attitudes, emotions, and values constituted as habits.

Furthermore, LS, as we will explain below, have proven to be an ideal strategy for the development of teachers’ practical thinking (Elbaz-Luwich, 2010; Savvidou, 2010; Pareja, Ormel, Mckenney, Voogt, & Pieters, 2014; Peña, 2013). It is precisely through active participation in reflective and cooperative research practices that we identify and reformulate the different resources that make up our practical knowledge and thinking. Teachers must train themselves as researchers of their own practice to identify and regulate the implicit and explicit resources that constitute our professional competencies (Levine, 2010; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999).

Lesson Studyas a context for reconstructing practical knowledge

There is already a significant volume of studies showing the effectiveness of LS for teachers to reflect on their practices and for students to improve their learning (Elliott, 2012; Susuki, 2012; Cheung and Wong, 2014; Dudley, 2012; Lewis, 2009). The main purpose of our research has been to analyze how LS contributes to focusing and making visible the implicit aspects of the main dimensions of practical thinking (knowledge, skills, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions) of each teacher, in this case early childhood education, as well as its potential to facilitate its reconstruction.5 In this sense, and starting from the two complementary moments involved in the formation of practical thinking (theorizing practice and experimenting with theory), we will now analyze the potential of the different phases of LS to stimulate and generate the theoretical and practical mental processes required in them, based on the evidence gathered in the aforementioned research.

Theorizing practice in the LS process

Within the framework of the Lesson Study process, the visualization of the implicit theories that underpin teaching practice occurs mainly in the moments of reflection, analysis, and observation of practice. Individual and group deliberation and observation of the practice developed, observed, and/or recorded stimulates the theorization of practice. We have been able to identify and stimulate these moments primarily in:

• First and second phase (6): defining the problem and cooperatively designing the experimental lesson. It can provoke reflection on each teacher’s prior experience by sharing the insights and uncertainties of their daily practice, attempting to identify the knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and emotions linked to them. In our research, this phase of contrast and reflection, from what has been done to what is desired (content of the design to be carried out), has received special attention and relevance. The practice itself began with personal accounts shared through writing and dialogue. This space for confidences, according to the teachers involved, fostered a climate of trust conducive to sustaining common strengths, questioning shared doubts, and showing fears (one of the most present emotions in some phases of the process) associated with situations of change.

In the design phase, constant evidence of the teachers’ practical knowledge emerges; putting ourselves in a situation of doing rather than talking about what is done, provokes the emergence of the implicit.

The teachers stated in this phase that their concern in daily practice diverged from the principles they explicitly share; thus, in their practice, the real importance of pencil-and-paper activities, the homogeneity of the proposed activities, etc., and finally, the primacy of their direct mediation/intervention appears, even though they state that this is not necessary for learning to occur.

But it is true that for me, one of the concerns is that children do not produce a dossier of worksheets, not doing the same activities for everyone, because they are not all the same and we are still stuck with the same issues! There is something we say and do not do, and for me that is a serious problem, because I love to say that all children are different. In my class I have 25 children, and then they arrive at the corner and, more or less, the activity is the same… (Belén (7), 2nd Meeting Design Phase of the Lesson April 3, 2013).

These beliefs emerge crystallized with some frequency in the design phase, when they express their doubts about the new proposal that is beginning to emerge: an environment for building paths with tubes and balls to learn mathematics. For example, some of the recurring ideas that emerge have to do with the possible conflict that can arise among students in the new environment, and therefore, it would be necessary to intervene more directly to establish rules, present the environment and materials, design the assemblies to share what has been learned… A certain need to organize, direct, or guide educational action emerges, a tendency that converges with their daily practices. In the course of these debates and when beliefs emerge strongly, the contrasted design makes visible the distance (8) “are we designing thelessonto do the same thing we wanted to improve?” (Belén, 4th Design Phase Meeting, April 24, 2013).

This contrast guided the shared concerns and desires for change around issues such as opening up methodological structures by recreating learning environments, trust in students’ self-regulation capacity, the need to review the materials and resources offered to students, the relevance of designing pedagogical contexts, and above all, the review of the directive and proactive role the teacher had towards an approach where observation and the design of learning contexts gain greater importance. This process of constructing the proposal required conceptual clarification due to the need to build a shared language.

This initial phase of description and dialogue linked to the design we want to develop can facilitate the identification and contrast of teachers’ primitive pedagogical Gestalts and their informed reconstruction through group deliberation and contrast with contributions from research.

Third, fourth, and fifth phases: the moments of analysis and observation of the “Lesson, where teachers record and collect evidence of student learning.

First, the group unanimously expressed their limited experience in observing their students and how participating in this experience helped them develop a new and necessary skill, which also facilitated reflection on their practical knowledge and a change in perspective towards their students:

Vito comments that before doing the observation, she was very confused about what exactly she had to look at and didn’t know how she was going to do it, but then she realized that the observation table helped her a lot. Belén highlights that this is one of the new strategies they have learned and that it would have been much more difficult to learn it alone. (Research diary. Initial proposal analysis phase, July 9, 2013).

Secondly, the teacher who is not developing the lesson is observing the educational process from a different position than they usually have in their classroom; this experience stirs them and resonates, provoking stimulating reflection on their own practice.

And that’s where we all felt identified with you. When I saw you like that, I said I would do the same… (Belén, 1st Meeting of the proposal analysis phase, June 10, 2013.)

As we are saying goodbye, Ana points out that she has felt very relaxed all morning, that things that make her very nervous in her class she has seen them differently here and has faced them with calm, and that she believes this should be done from time to time. (Research diary, Revised proposal development phase, July 5, 2013.)

In our research, the decision to video record the experimental proposals allowed the teachers developing the action to see themselves in a mirror, where they were able to appreciate details that were somewhat invisible or unnoticeable in the emergence of their daily practice, a unique opportunity to evidence and provoke reflection in the phase of understanding, debate, and evaluation of the lesson on the characteristics of the theories in use, the practical knowledge of the group and of each of its members.

Yes, yes, but I, you know… the issue of working in corners has been one of my pending assignments… if I don’t land a little bit on the table in the end and do something for everyone at once… that’s one of the things that gets you soaked. But it seemed to me that the morning was going to be too long, without having those moments and, however… it didn’t seem to me that the children found it long, nor… that the children got bored like other times. (Lena, 1st Meeting of the proposal analysis phase, June 10, 2013).

Through the contrast of evidence gathered by the teachers, this phase offers the opportunity to question and discuss as a group the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own practice, theoretically analyzing the relevance of the processes experienced both in the design of the Lessonand in its development.

Experiencing theory in the LS process

In some cases, and to our surprise, from the very first readings that teachers do to analyze the focus of the Lesson Study, incipient and interesting changes begin in their immediate classroom practices.

I have changed, ever since I read in one of the first articles the phrase… ‘Playtime for students who have finished their task’ – I identified with it; when I read it, I said, ‘That’s me.’ You know, the moment I read it, I saw it and I didn’t like it. And now, for example, the other day I changed it and didn’t put the corners after the task, which is when they play, but I put them at the beginning, as soon as they arrived, for a long time, more than an hour. (Lola, 2nd LS Design Phase meeting, April 3, 2013).

From our experience, we can say that, although the experimentation of the theory occurs, above all, in the moments of development (initial and improved) of the experimental proposal, it can take place at any time during the process. Experience reveals how the cooperative research-action process allows teachers to put new theory into practice through the activation of new agreed-upon attitudes and skills, new habits for experimenting with that informed Gestalt that has been reconstructed in the design phase. It cannot be forgotten that replacing consolidated pedagogical habits of perception, interpretation, and intervention requires unlearning and relearning, that is, it requires time, conditions, and the will to overcome the inevitable internal and external obstacles that favor the maintenance of the status quo. In this sense, and as an example, the teacher who develops the proposal within the agreed-upon framework of principles, initially concerned about this new situation of being observed, is reconstructing her automatic habits by incorporating attitudes and skills that are beginning to make her own beliefs and routines more visible in an environment that, as they themselves state, has been comfortable, conducive, and protective.

… I haven’t felt observed at any point in a way that made me uncomfortable. And I’ve been very happy that my class is working (…) So, yes, I think I’m happy about that. I don’t know, you tell me… (Lena, 1st Meeting of the proposal analysis phase, June 10, 2013.)

Likewise, another of the teachers becomes aware of her own childhood image, as well as the possibilities of self-regulation of her own students when initially questioning the process followed in the Lesson Study, as we saw earlier with the issue of conflict:

Lena: I don’t see… everyone at the same time in a class, I don’t think so…

Ana: In case it were possible, more spread out because there they will be… in Japan they will be used to it, but here… (2nd LS Design Phase meeting, April 3, 2013.)

The cooperative dimension of LS is a first-rate value for facilitating this process.

I think it will be very difficult to get rid of that unconscious thought, because for me it will remain unconscious, which is why I believe we will need external instruments, either for someone to investigate us or for common reflection, to help me bring that out, because the unconscious, precisely, is characterized by the fact that I often don’t realize what I’m doing, or what I have inside. (Lena, General Meeting prior to the start of the research, June 29, 2011.)

Despite starting from the individual experiences of each of them at the beginning, at all times during the proposal analysis phase, the teachers spoke in the plural when referring to Lena’s actions and later to Ana’s, which is evidence of the strong group feeling and collective construction that this process incorporates, thus avoiding unfounded sensitivities and fears in sharing the experience and opening the classroom doors to other teachers.

Nati adds that usually in daily work you don’t stop to think and you do what has been done to you, and only this group work allows you to become aware of it. (Research diary, Proposal analysis phase, April 24, 2013.)

Similarly, the cyclical and sustainable conception of the LS proposal over time is another excellent condition for the formation of new habits.

Nati states that it will be easier for them each time, until they have it automated, and Belén confirms it, (…) Lena recognizes that on many occasions she has found it difficult to remain silent and restrain herself, but she has found it easier because this restraint is the result of consensus. This shows how LS has helped her to change her teaching role towards action more consistent with her declared theories. (Research diary, Proposal analysis phase, April 24, 2013.)

The characteristics of our research,9 in which only one LS has been developed, show that the experimentation of the new theory or the new informed Gestalt, and its conversion into new, more flexible and powerful habits and dispositions, require more practical moments in addition to the second experimentation planned in theLesson (10).

During the process experienced in the research, some teachers became aware that even though the explicit purpose of the LS they had designed was to protect each student’s freedom to promote their autonomy and responsibility in early childhood education, they could not always control their acquired habit of intervening directly and invasively in the students’ space, actively directing their actions. The mere awareness of this subjective pedagogical tendency did not, in some teachers, lead to the modification of deeply consolidated habits and teaching attitudes in their practical knowledge. In other teachers with different pedagogical dispositions, more profound transformations were evident not only in their role but also in their classroom’s teaching methodology (Peña et al., monographic).

To provoke this transformation, we believe that repeated participation in LS processes is necessary, which, through cooperation in observation and action, allows the transformation of intuitive Gestalts into informed Gestalts that consolidate and precipitate new and desired ways of proceeding. This second experimentation is the starting point for further individual or group practices that each teacher develops to consolidate new habits, attitudes, values, and emotions. Therefore, with the aim of using LS as a powerful tool to foster the reconstruction of practical knowledge, it seems necessary to conceive it in Spain, as in other countries, as continuous Cooperative Action-Research programs, involving a group of teachers over a prolonged period. Informed practical thinking requires reflection and experience, experience and reflection. Not all practical knowledge or know-how has the desired pedagogical potential. It will be necessary to understand its nature, meaning, history, and functionality. This nature, experiential and reflective, implies the transformation of historically established pedagogical beliefs and assumptions, resistant to analysis, change, and reformulation.

Some final notes

The first result of our research refers to the variability and flexibility of LS. Since practical thinking is not stable, but is formed and evolves based on concrete practices, contextual demands, and professional requirements, we believe it is necessary to reflect on how LS can become a relevant tool for improving not only practice but also teachers’ practical knowledge, if we start from the concerns and pedagogical culture of the different geographical and social contexts where the action takes place.

The second refers to the relevance of a conceptual framework for interpretation that is shaped throughout the inquiry process. Conceiving the formation of practical thinking as a dynamic process with two complementary movements: theorizing practice and experimenting with theory, as well as the debate on the components that constitute this practical thinking (knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and emotions) has offered invaluable support to both teachers and researchers in better understanding the richness and complexity of their proclaimed theories and their theories in use.

The third result refers to the relevance of the methodological nuance that has individualized our interpretation and development of LS. We have focused on the improvement of teaching-learning, as an object of observation, analysis, review, and debate, in order to stimulate the theorization of practice and the experimentation of each teacher’s theory, particularly by investigating and reflecting on the harmony and/or dissonance between their proclaimed theories and their theories in use, especially focusing on the implicit dimensions of their practical knowledge. The best strategy for curricular experimentation is, ultimately, the development of teachers’ practical thinking, and this development is inconceivable without reflection on shared experiences of curricular experimentation.

The fourth result refers to the shared conviction among teachers and researchers that the experimentation of theory, the reformulation of unwanted, insufficient, or inappropriate habits, attitudes, and beliefs in the educational process requires long and persistent programs of novel teaching experiences, in successive LS cycles, because unlearning and relearning tacit, emotionally ingrained components resistant to change does not occur through mere cognitive illumination or clarification, but requires sustained experience in the everyday contexts of practice. Lesson Study cycles become a privileged tool in initial and ongoing training, by linking teachers’ professional development with curricular experimentation and cooperative self-training (Stenhouse, 1975). As Claxton (2013) proposes, reconstructing meanings involves and requires re-experiencing relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the natural world. Informed practical thinking requires reflection and experience, experience and reflection, preferably in community.

We conclude that what matters to us is the methodological change, the role we want to play. Our need was more important to us in relation to these aspects than learning logical-mathematical concepts. Our biggest challenge is that change of ‘mindset’ regarding our role. The great contribution of Lesson Study has been focused basically on this change of the teacher’s role. […] Here we have been unanimous, yes we have seen the way […] we commented on the iceberg metaphor, and it is that the presence of the educator ‘is supported’ by considerable work of prior design and practical reflection, and indeed that is what we have experienced with all this group work. (Final minutes of the teachers from the LS Group, January 14, 2014.)

In conclusion, it can be affirmed that the research developed through the implementation of LS, especially focused on teachers’ practical thinking, can contribute decisively to enriching teacher training processes by addressing a dimension that is usually forgotten (Schön, 1998): the one located in the interstices between theoretical training and practical training, through the incorporation of teachers’ practical knowledge in cooperative action research processes: Lesson Study.

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Notes

1. The project developed by the research group at the University of Málaga (2011-2015), led by Ángel I. Pérez Gómez, has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain within the National R&D&I Plan (EDU2011-29732-C02-02) “Practical knowledge in early childhood education teachers and its implications in initial and ongoing teacher training: cooperative action research (LS)”.
2. Classic holistic positions, such as those of Dewey (1933) or Jackson (1987), insisted on considering human experience as the unit of multiple different and even conflicting aspects, and not just the rationalist dimension of human knowledge and behavior (Descartes’ error) by placing consciousness as the sole instance for proposing and controlling our thoughts and actions. 
3. Most researchers in cognitive neuroscience confirm the non-conscious nature of at least 90% of the mechanisms that humans activate to perceive, interpret, make decisions, and intervene in the complex reality they inhabit, both in the personal, professional, and social spheres (Damasio, 2010; Inmordino-Yang, 2011).
4. They are almost the only ones that have been worked on in teacher training.
5. The project we are developing aims to investigate the practical knowledge of seven kindergarten teachers participating in an LS process, between March 2013 and February 2014, which included a total of 24 meetings for the different phases of the cycle; two experimental lessons and an exhaustive review of documents related to the focus of theLesson. The meetings and experimental lessons were video recorded and the meetings were transcribed for analysis. Documents produced by the teachers on the design and review of the experimental lessons (lesson design document, observation record sheets, meeting minutes, etc.) were also analyzed. The authors of this article conducted the case study of the LS developed. 
6. A description of the phases of Lesson Study can be found in the introductory article of this special issue by Soto and Pérez Gómez.
7. The real names of the teachers have been replaced by fictitious ones for confidentiality reasons. 
8. Within the LS process, the organization and distribution of roles are of particular relevance. In this case, one of the group members, on a rotating basis, maintains the focus on the agreed-upon principles during the design and analysis phase of the proposal.
9. The seven teachers in our research’s Lesson Study group come from five different schools. This, combined with the organizational characteristics of most Spanish schools, where teachers spend almost all their time with their students, makes it difficult, though not impossible, to establish LS beyond the process initiated for this research. Evidence of the possibilities can be found in Caparrós’s article in this same special issue. 
10. Chade-Meng and Goleman (2011) state that, generally, it takes between three and six months of employment for a new habit to become more natural than the old one.