Kikan-Shido: through the lens of guiding student activity

The lesson event ‘Kikan-Shido’ (Between Desks Instruction) is used to compare different forms of guidance provided by teachers in mathematics classrooms across six cities. While Kikan-Shido had a recognizable structural form in all the mathematic classrooms in the data set, there was variation in both the amount of time devoted to Kikan-Shido and in the way individual mathematics teachers’ ‘Guided Student Activity’. In this paper, examples of individual teacher guidance are examined to draw out the subtleties of practice in three ‘Asian’ and three ‘Western’ classrooms. It is posited that differences in activity are related to specific pedagogical principles that appear to underlie the teachers’ practice. The occurrence of similarities in practice across apparent cultural categories problematises simplistic East-West comparative cultural analyses.