During the last decade, "Lesson Study", a Japanese professional development model involving a community of learners, has been spreading to countries around the world. "Lesson Study" is a systematic process of inquiry into classroom practices where teachers collaborate in planning, implementing, observing and revising lessons.…

In this paper, we examined data collected as part of a 5-year project designed to foster reform-based urban science teaching through teachers' communities of inquiry. Drawing upon a distributed leadership framework, we analyzed teacher "talk" during professional learning community (PLC) meetings. This analysis yielded five elements:…