August 6 - 10, 2001

Some teachers at Highland Elementary school in San Mateo took a big step last year. After hearing about the Japanese Lesson Study model, they launched their own effort. This August, this work was the basis for a week-long collaboration between American and Japanese teachers, putting the model into practice on a large scale, culminating in a public lesson attended by over a hundred observers. With support from the Chabot Space and Science Center's Right From the Start grant, I attended.

How Does Lesson Study Work?
Lesson Study is a structure for teacher collaboration involving lesson planning, observation of teaching and discussion of the results, followed by revision and reteaching. Each of these three phases has a protocol that has been worked out through much trial and error.

Lesson Planning
Central to Lesson Study is the lesson being taught. The research lesson is usually planned by a team, and is written up in detail. The topic chosen is one that presents a challenge to students, that is difficult or problematic to teach. The plans we saw last week included the California standards the students were expected to have learned, as well as the standards that were the focus of the lesson at hand. The research lesson plans include familiar things such as materials to be used, but also key questions the teacher will pose. These questions lead up to a "hatsumon," the Japanese word for the question that sets the task for the students to solve. This question in particular must be well thought through. A second valuable component to the lesson plans are the expected student responses to these questions. We try to anticipate the students' responses so that our plan can follow the students' natural thinking as it responds to these questions. When we reflect on our lesson later, we compare our projections with reality, and find where our expectations were correct or wrong.

The Lesson Itself
The lesson plan is shared in advance with teachers who will be observing the lesson, along with a seating chart, so that observers can take detailed notes on individual student responses. One or two teachers present the lesson. When students tackle the problem, observers mingle among them, looking at their work and eavesdropping on their conversations, to try to find out what they are thinking and learning. Observers do not speak to the students or help them in any way. At times, the teacher being observed may ask observers to pay particular attention to certain students or particular instructional issues.

Lesson Discussion
Following the lesson, teachers gather and a follow a structured discussion protocol. A moderator invites the teacher who has taught to give his opinion of the lesson. Then a couple of other panelists make observations and pose a few questions to the teacher, who responds. The questions tend to focus on the issues that arose during the lesson. When were the students clear? When confused? Were the materials appropriate? Were the questions useful in provoking the students to think? How was the pacing? Were there opportunities missed? How did the students' responses compare to those anticipated in the plan? What could we change to make the lesson work better? The focus is on the lesson, and though there may be criticism felt by the teacher, the goal is to improve the lesson and learn.
The best example of this came on Thursday of last week, when a San Mateo teacher taught a lesson on area and perimeter. She and her team had set a very ambitious set of objectives for the one hour lesson. The fifth grade students would use Geo boards to make a variety of rectangles. They would then be asked to choose a single perimeter and make as many rectangles they could with that same perimeter. The goal was for them to see that area and perimeter were distinct and independent. The lesson ran into trouble early on when the students, who had worked with Geoboards in the past, counted the pegs instead of the spaces, yielding incorrect perimeters. A second problem occurred when a significant number of students failed to follow instructions to keep the perimeter constant. The teacher plowed ahead, however, anxious to get the numbers on the board and get students to see the patterns that resulted.
The discussion that followed this lesson was rich. The teacher was very self critical from the start, which gave the rest of us permission to join her in trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, and how it might be improved. How could her directions have been clearer? Were the students focused on solving a big problem, or were they just following the teacher step by step, without really thinking about where they were going? How could we get the students to take over more of the problem-solving? Were the Geoboards the best manipulative? Was the question appropriate for these students? Every aspect of the lesson was rethought. In a regular lesson study, this would be followed by several weeks of revision, and then the revised lesson would be retaught to a new group of students. Another discussion would evaluate the effectiveness of the revisions.
As with many of the lessons this week, teachers tried to cram way too much content into a one hour lesson. The goal is not to teach as much as possible in one hour, but to explore how students are learning as a lesson unfolds naturally.

Big Lessons
We learned the most about Lesson Study by working with the American teachers. We learned some great lessons about teaching from our Japanese colleagues. A few memories. Mr. Hattori posing as a nitwit with his class of first graders, intentionally putting pairs of numbers on the board all sideways and upside down, inviting the children to correct him and impose order on the list. Mr. Takahashi discovering that half his class thinks one thing, the other half disagrees. He calls on ten different students, each of whom assert their answer with no explanation or justification. "Six." "No, seven." "Six," "seven," and so on. He did this, he explained later, to create discomfort among the students ­ a hunger for resolution. On another question, a student gives a wrong answer. He looks quizzical, asking the class, "Do you agree?" Another student disagrees, providing another explanation. The first student says, "he is right. I was wrong." Mr. Takahashi says, "That is very good thinking. If we are thinking, we make mistakes," and leads the class in giving a round of applause to the student for his great thinking. What fantastic ways to build student motivation from within!

Catherine Lewis quotes a Japanese teacher who said "A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river." The idea of the flow of the lesson came up many times. There is a flow of time, then there is the flow of the teacher-driven lesson, and the flow of the students' ideas as they develop through the hour. We want the teacher flow to run closely parallel to the student flow, constantly checking and adjusting to keep pace.

Next Steps
Much discussion centered around how to make Lesson Study work in our schools. We need active administrative support and participation. But the key ingredient will be teacher enthusiasm and initiative, and, as Catherine Lewis said at the closing, the feeling that this will not be "just one more thing," but actually a process that gives structure and coherence to valuable collaborative work between teachers. Back in Oakland, we have a large group of teachers collaborating District-wide in creating a "shared frugal curriculum," one of the other foundations of Lesson Study. If groups of teachers are ready to work together and learn from one another, and really start looking closely at how students are learning, then Lesson Study can take off.

Anthony Cody, Aug. 11, 2001