Context

Lesson Study

Rapidly changing skills needs, transforming jobs and the increasingly challenging task of motivating and educating students often with accumulated experiences of school failure and poor basic competences require us to rethink teaching and learning in VET. The Cedefop research study "Vocational pedagogies and benefits for learners: practices and challenges in Europe (2015) examined the role played by learning outcomes approaches in pedagogical change in initial VET in 15 EU Member States, including three of our LS4VET partner countries: Hungary, Malta and the Netherlands. It has found that though pedagogical change is often advocated, it has not or not successfully been implemented. To ensure effective,high quality VET, teachers/trainers need to continuously improve not only their vocation-specific competences, but also their pedagogical-methodological skills. Therefore, there is a strong need to introduce effective and sustainable forms of their continuous professional development also in this regard.

Increasing evidence shows that schools where teachers work collaboratively and develop a high level of “professional capital” outperform those where teachers work in isolation.

Teacher communities of practice are the natural and primary venue of teacher learning, however, they enhance teacher professional development most if they are based on deep professional collaboration. Teacher collaboration plays a vital role in various elements of teachers’ work and has been found to have a positive impact on teaching quality and student performance. An effective model of teacher professional development based on deep teacher collaboration and focusing on the improvement of student learning through improving teachers’ methodological skills is Lesson Study (LS).