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Lesson study (LS) is a professional development approach that has been attracting attention as an educational innovation since the late 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that contribute to the adoption of LS by schools in developing countries without development assistance.

The diffusion of innovation theory was used as an explanatory device. The study examined the characteristics of LS perceived by 28 teachers in an Indonesian primary school, where LS was actively and autonomously adopted without development assistance. Data were collected from multiple sources, including interviews with some teachers and a questionnaire for all 28 teachers.

While previous studies have indicated that LS as an educational innovation lacks the ideal sets of perceived characteristics that could promote its adoption, this study found that such negative characteristics were mitigated in the Indonesian school. It also found that some of the factors facilitating LS adoption may be information on the outcomes of LS and less hierarchical relationships among teachers and professors. Furthermore, active school leadership was found to be a significant factor in this adoption.

Regarding adoption of LS in developing countries, previous studies focused on how development assistance works, what strategies of development assistance are necessary for introducing LS and how development assistance programs can be sustained. However, scant attention has been paid to how schools in developing countries have fared without development assistance. This study sheds light on this missing point.

Perceived compatibility between requirements of managerial work and attributes of women is believed important to the advancement and success of women, and research demonstrates continued ambivalence about women executives. The question of how images of women executives are disseminated, reproducing or contesting negative characterizations, has received little attention. The research reported here focuses on US business press as a cultural carrier disseminating images of women executives. Critical discourse analysis examined 27 front page Wall Street Journal accounts of 22 women executives in the year following Carly Fiorina’s appointment to head Hewlett‐Packard; 20 front page accounts of 24 men executives were used as comparison. Prominently featured articles on women executives provide fractured images of women as executives: while some accounts are positive, other portrayals reinforce negative perceptions of women’s competence and likeability as executives and concerns about the social order. Similar issues are not raised in coverage of male executives. Author gender does not seem to affect the portrayal.

This research explores lesson study as a way to enhance the quality of teaching for pupils with learning disabilities and autism spectrum disorder by observing changes to one pupil's (Wilma) active educational participation. The study also investigates if and in what ways the professional development impacted teaching practices.

Five teachers met with the author on four occasions. Between these meetings, the teachers delivered the lessons they had planned together. The author video recorded the meetings to discern how the teachers' expressions developed. The author shared their thoughts with another researcher to enable an interrater validity examination.

The implementation of the lesson study vehicle enabled the teachers to transform their thinking from mainly focusing on pupils' deficiencies to instead focusing on their strengths. A relationship was found between teachers' understanding of central coherence, their skills in adapting received instructions and pupils' abilities to process and contextualize information or discern the whole picture.

Research that involves teachers in the learning process emphasizes the relation between teachers’ thinking and their potential to enable the contextualized inclusion of pupils with learning disabilities.

This research offers important insights into how school-day navigation for pupils with severe intellectual disability and autism can be understood through the lens of variation theory; the teachers' repeated and adjusted use of the frame on the schedule strip enabled Wilma to discern what would happen next during the school day.