Lesson study as an effective process to develop evidence-informed teaching practice of trainee and early career geography teachers

Perhaps more than ever before, there is a real opportunity to develop communities of professional learning that instil habits of collaboration, deep thinking and critically reflective practice in our early career geography teachers. The current strength of partnerships between school clusters, academy chains and multi-academy trusts means that the practices and habits that trainees begin to develop during their initial teacher education (ITE) can be effectively embraced and taken forward in their early careers to drive effective and evidence-informed practice in our geography departments. The necessity of depth of knowledge for geography teachers, in terms of both pedagogical content knowledge and subject-specific knowledge, has been widely seen as essential and is now a commitment in policy through the education inspection framework (Ofsted, 2019), the ITT core content framework (DfE, 2019), which is the minimum entitlement for trainees, and, more recently, the draft initial teacher e