How does a Japanese primary school teacher manage the whole-class discussion named neriage?

Abstract

This study aims to understand how Japanese teachers design tasks and manage instruction during the whole-class phase, named neriage, to create an opportunity for students to collectively develop logical thinking. We situated our study within a French theoretical approach, called the Double Approach (both didactical and ergonomical), to characterise teachers’ practices through the analyses of students’ activities in the classroom and teachers’ activities inside and outside the classroom. We conducted qualitative analyses of a Japanese primary school teacher’s practices in the context of lesson study. The analyses focus on teacher’s choice of tasks (cognitive component) and her interventions during the whole-class phases (mediative component). The purpose was to clarify the global coherence between the macro level—teacher’s choices for the sequence of lessons according to a global project—and local level—teacher’s interventions during the whole-class phase of neriage for a lesson. The results of the analyses show key elements of teacher’s practices, specifically, the control of the value of different didactical variables for the tasks proposed in the sequence of lessons and for the teacher’s interventions with additional sub-tasks and questions during the neriage phase.