Up Close and Personal with Lesson Study Brings Valuable New Insights
From Mackenzie Hird
I recently had a chance to visit the Greenwich Japanese School (GJS), a K-9 school where the teachers use Lesson Study to prepare in-depth lessons. Lesson Study, which has been talked about in previous editions of STEM Pals, is a method of cooperative lesson planning among groups of 4 or 5 teachers. Teachers jointly develop a lesson, spending between 10 and 20 hours to develop the “first draft” of this lesson plan. Then, one teacher delivers this lesson while the other teachers observe the students’ understanding and questions. Before having a finished prduct, the teachers improve this lesson iteratively over the next few months of discussion and presentation to different classes.

Actually seeing Lesson Study in practice allowed me to observe essential details that I have not read in the literature. First of all, the level of detail in each lesson is amazing. The Lesson Study groups often go through one or more “mock teaching” sessions with other teachers, some of whom have been part of the planning and some of whom have not. This allows the teachers to revise the presentation and specific wording of particular parts of the lesson. Teachers even create a diagram to represent what will be presented on the blackboard and when each topic will be introduced. In particular, the Greenwich Japanese School has a philosophy that everything from one lesson should not fill up more than one blackboard - with no erasing - so that each and every student can at a glance understand what has already been covered in the lesson.

This particular school that I visited uses Lesson Study to develop problem-based learning lessons. While this does not have to be the case, many teachers from other schools observing that day were from schools already practicing Lesson Study and wanting to move towards problem-based learning. These teachers felt that problem-based learning would be more engaging for teachers in the Lesson Study process. For instance, during problem-based learning exercises, it is easy for students to become lost in problems that are too challenging or bored by problems that are too easy. One time-intensive task that Lesson Study teachers at GJS were developing involved “clue” cards that they could hand out to students who were particularly lost or frustrated by a difficult problem. One challenge for teachers throughout the Lesson Study process is finding “the right clue” that would make the solution attainable without making it too easy (and thus inauthentic). Overall, these visiting teachers found that the challenge associated with developing a high-quality, problem-based learning lesson motivated them to dive more deeply into the Lesson Study process, in turn producing more professional development results.

Finally, many teachers were excited to use Lesson Study to develop new lessons based on the Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core State Standards in Math and English. The first step in designing any new lesson is to fully understand the standards and curricula motivating the creation of that lesson. Many teachers felt that the new standards (and resulting curricula) were so complicated that it took a Lesson Study group to cooperatively pull apart the meaning behind each standard. One science teacher I spoke with was a part of a Lesson Study group where each member was assigned to make sure that each of the three “strands” from the NGSS was featured prominently in the final lesson, in an attempt to make lessons that authentically represented the intent of the standards.

When I travelled to Connecticut expecting to see Lesson Study in action, I thought I would reaffirm things that I already knew about the practice. Instead, I saw another dimension of Lesson Study that had been improved and adapted to challenges that American teachers face everyday; a dimension which solidified for me the pressing need for Lesson Study to be widely adopted across the United States.

Mac Hird is a Ph.D. student in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT and is studying education as a complex socio-technical system.

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