Lesson Study. A new look at a familiar term

Nowadays people talk more and more about improving educational system, implementing changes to curriculum, and using new technology in the classroom. However, one more aspect we should not forget is improving teaching.

James Hiebert, an education researcher at the University of Delaware, says to improve education we need to shift from thinking about how to improve teachers to thinking about how to improve teaching. Hiebert talks about the Uninted States, but this can apply to any country. The idea that improving education is about improving teachers is common for Kazakhstan as well. It is much easier to fire "bad" teachers and recruit "good" ones than train teachers to let them become "good".

What we need is to imrove teaching, not to improve teachers. We should stop asking "Is this teacher effective?", but ask "Are the methods they are using effective, and could they use other methods?" This is where the concept of lesson study becomes a valuable asset to a solution of ineffective teaching.

Lesson study is a form of professional development which Japanese teachers use to help them improve and to incorporate new ideas and methods into their teaching developed by Akihiko Takahashi, who is a professor of math education at DePaul University. “If there’s no lesson study,” Takahashi says, “how can teachers learn how to improve instruction?”

Emily Hanford from American RadioWorks in her article "‘Lesson Study’ Technique: What Teachers Can Learn From One Another" writes about successful use of this technique in the United States. There are some challenges that teachers face when they start using this technique:

• It is very time consuming;
• The are no immidiate results;
• It is diffiult to assess the impact of lesson study to student's achievements;
• Not all authorities support this idea, etc.

However, this approach is spreading in the US and teachers mention its positive influence on their development. It works much better than one-day workshops that we are used to. It is said that teachers are not always able to use ideas from workshops in their classroom, that is why they end up teaching in the same way they were taught.

Lesson Study gives an opportunity to try something in the classroom, let other teachers observe it and then discuss alltogether whether it worked or not. I think, it is a great way to see your own methods from a new perspective and start implementing changes in teaching.

Katrina Schwartz in her most recent articles "Lesson Study: When Teachers Team Up to Improve Teaching" and "Lesson Study? There’s an App for That" talks more about a growing trend of Lesson Study in the US. Increasingly education leaders are seeing lesson study as a powerful way to grow teacher-leaders willing to try new things and continually improve. The process helps to create a supportive environment within a building that encourages the hard work of teaching. But it requires leadership from principals and districts. Teachers need time to plan their lessons together, observe one another’s classes and to report after the lesson. In order to give them the time they need, the school or district has to pay substitute teachers and allocate planning time. The best way to do that is if the principal decides to allocate professional development money and time to implement lesson study school-wide as a central part of its professional development.

Kazakhstan is similar to the US in the way that all changes in education are promoted by the Ministry of Education and Science. It becomes a top-down approach to implementing new issues. It is time now to provide teachers with an opportunity to facilitate progress and use bottom up approach because, I think, the best ideas for improving education come from teachers.

References:

Hanford, Emily. (2015). ‘Lesson Study’ Technique: What Teachers Can Learn From One Another. American RadioWorks. Retrieved from: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/09/14/lesson-study-technique-what-teachers-can-learn-from-one-another/


Schwartz, Katrina. (March, 2016). Lesson Study? There’s an App for That. MindShift. Retrieved from: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/10/lesson-study-theres-an-app-for-that/


Schwartz, Katrina. (May, 2016). Lesson Study: When Teachers Team Up to Improve Teaching. MindShift. Retrieved from: http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/05/25/lesson-study-when-teachers-team-up-to-improve-teaching/