Teaching standards are regularly described as a mechanism for improving the status of
the teaching profession and as a means to develop high-quality teachers. Less attention
has been paid to the difficulties of fostering professional learning when externally produced
standards are imposed on teachers. This paper outlines how lesson study can
inform the use of teaching standards to shift the focus to centre on learning rather
than teaching to richly inform national and international views on the use of teaching
standards. More specifically, it explores how lesson study was a powerful process
that developed a lived understanding of teaching standards and fostered two significant
discursive shifts in teacher understanding of standards: from individual to collegial
activity; and secondly from statements of teaching to centring the focus on processes of
learning.