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Introduction
Ma’s (1999) seminal study surprised the mathematics and mathematics education community that the Chinese teachers whom she studied possessed profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM) with limited academic training (Fang and Paine, 2008). Yet how and why they have developed that knowledge still remains a significant research problem, which researchers have just started investigating. It is imperative that more investigations are needed to yield insights into the substantive school-based teacher learning arrangements. These arrangements have not only enabled the forming of Chinese teachers’ PUFM but also produced great impact on students who have demonstrated strong performance in international mathematics and science assessments (Fan and Zhu, 2004; OECD, 2014). As a result, there has been an increasing interest in exploring the characteristics of teaching and teacher education in China (Fan et al., 2015; Li and Huang, 2013).
Earlier studies had adopted multiple perspectives in investigating mathematics education in China (Fan et al., 2004), such as socio-cultural perspectives (Biggs and Watkins, 2001; Stevenson and Stigler, 1992), focusing on classroom instruction (Leung, 2005; Li and Huang, 2013), and student behaviors (Fan et al., 2004), as well as teacher knowledge (An et al., 2004; Ma, 1999), among others. Ma (1999) and other researchers (Fang et al., 2012; Paine and Ma, 1993; Wang and Lin, 2005) speculated that the fact that Chinese mathematics teachers studied curriculum and other instructional materials collaboratively in school-based teaching research groups (TRGs) had promoted their understanding of their subject matters. But not until more recently, closer attention has been paid to collaborative endeavors in improving teaching through Chinese Lesson Study (CLS), an approach known for teacher professional development in China. CLS includes cycles of collaborative activities, such as lesson planning, delivering planned lessons along with team observation of classroom teaching, post-lesson debriefing (including talk lesson) and reflection, followed by continued revisions for improvement (Huang and Bao, 2006; Yang and Ricks, 2013).
CLS can be generally seen as different from Japanese Lesson Study in four major aspects (Huang and Han, 2015), even though both have a variety of different forms, run by different levels of administrative or academic functions for diverse purposes (Lewis, 2016). First, for a long time, CLS is content focused, oriented to developing best teaching strategies for...