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Becoming a better teacher. Ways of dealing with the content made a topic of conversation among teachers.

This thesis reports results from a study that focuses on teachers professional developmentduring an in-service training period.

The aim is to analyse and describe how the teachers talk about and handle lessoncontent. The first question concerns changes in relation to a specific object of learning.The second question concerns how they relate to a theoretical framework and thethird question concerns differences in the students learning outcome and if it can beunderstood in relation to the teachers development.

The variation theory is the theoretical framework that is used for lesson planningas well as when analysing results. The basis of the study is that learning always is thelearning of something and that the teachers activity as well as the students activityconstitutes the space of variation that decides what is possible to learn concerning adelimited object of learning, i.e. the enacted object of learning. The object of learningis seen as a capability and it can be defined by its critical features. The constitutionof the meaning aimed for the critical features of the object must be discerned. Theintentional object of learning describes the teachers intention with the lesson, andthe lived object of learning is what the students really discerned. The theoreticalassumption is that learning always assumes an experienced variation where learningis seen as a change in the learners possibility to experience the world in a certain way.You have to have experienced a phenomenon s variation to understand its meaning,i.e. what we experience is how something differs from something else.

The method is Learning study and it can be described as a hybrid of the JapaneseLesson study and Design experiment. A Learning study is theoretically grounded andthe primary focus is on an object of learning. The learning study group consisted ofthree teachers and most often two researchers. Each member had equal status in thegroup. The object of learning seen from the teachers perspective was the variationtheory that was gradually introduced by the researchers. The empirical material wasgenerated from audio-taped discussions and from videotaped lessons.

The findings should be seen as a contribution to the discussion about teachers professional development. The teachers participated in a collective construction of professionalknowledge and it can be stated that the teachers had no problem changingtheir discussions to focus on a specific object of learning when the theoretical frameworkwas used in relation to their own practices. Another finding is that the change in howthe teachers handled the object of learning influenced the students learning in a positiveway although the results were subtle.