Tadashi,

Thank you for opening our discussion and posing this question.

I have been encouraged, by some of sarah's comments to go back to the 
beginning of the forum, an dlook at how you have posed your seeding 
questions and to have a closer look and think about your posted items

Looking at your first item, and table 1, the aspects of kounai-ken that seem 
more useful to me for promoting teachers' CPD, are

1. continuity over time - continuing to engage with the discussion 
throughout the whole term
2. access to support from peers - basing kounai-ken in the school where the 
practice is
3. reflection before and reflection after - Jizen-ken and Jigo-ken - the 
combination of these two are remarked on by John Loughran in
Loughran, J. J. (1996). Developing Reflective Practice: Learning about 
Teaching and Learning through Modelling. London: Falmer Pr.

4. bringing reflection before and reflection after formally into focus as 
part of the discussion of the peers over the longer time

The reasons I think these aspects are most useful comes from the fact that 
together they represent active research on practice.  Jizen-ken helps set a 
frame for observation, and to be intentional about it, and may even reach in 
to hypothesising about 'If I do this, and this and this .... then I expect 
such-and-such to happen' so using theory to predict in-teaching practice 
responses.  Jigo-ken then captures, before the memory fades, what actually 
happened, and can document evidence for evidence-based practice, and 
attending to the theory-practice nexus, especially if a hypothesis was 
articulated for testing.  The pattern of Jizen-ken followed by Jigo-ken, 
amongst the same group, observing the same area of teaching, as a consistent 
pattern, over time, among the same group of practitioners, represents 
something like systematic inquiry, with a number of variables managed, and 
is likely to allow evidence-based data to be collected, theory-practice 
connections, and their suites of activity to be tested in practice, and 
in-practice activity of each teacher to become the site of such intensive 
and systematic examination, and if every one is involved, and it includes 
looking at their own practice as well as others, there is the capacity to 
begin to learn to be adult/ take an objective stance (in the Transactional 
Analysis model) about the examination of your own practice, while also 
collecting relevant ideas of how you might change your practice when it 
isn't working well, and what to look to as signs of good practice.

There are other ways of describing what is going on in kounai-ken, and 
perceiving it to fit other models of effective inquiry.  This is how I see 
it, informed by the literature I attend to.

As a process, there are limitations, as all processes can be limited.  But 
detailing that might be the work of another post.

Now that I have drafted this (my time of day is out of synch with Sarah and 
the UK, and probably closer to your own, and I have drafted this after being 
out of touch with the discussion for a day, and sensitive to what I had 
contributed yesterday that was a quick immediate response to one 
particularly useful model in a practice where many models are found to be 
useful), I find that you and others in the discussion have already responded 
with some of these ideas - ie we are all talking within a similar arena.

Dianne Allen
Kiama