Research for Better Schools

Lesson Study Conference 2003

Introduction

Along with Global Education Resources, the Greenwich Japanese School, and the Regional Eisenhower Consortium @ TERC, RBS sponsored the conference Toward a Common Understanding: Implementing Lesson Study Effectively on November 19–21, 2003. This conference was for teams of educators who had been engaging in lesson study for at least a year. It sought to help these educators deepen their understanding of lesson study and provide tools for how to sustain and strengthen the process they have started.

Lesson study can be used to improve teaching and learning in any subject area; however, this conference focused on mathematics and science, specifically in grades one through eight.

Rationale

We opened the conference with the following quote from Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

The purpose of the 2003 Lesson Study Conference, as captured in its title, was to help us learn to implement lesson study more effectively by moving us beyond a shallow, superficial acquaintance with it toward a common and deeper understanding. Through a shared vision, accompanied by concrete and explicit learning, we will seek a smoother path in our quest to help all students learn.

To arrive at a shared concrete understanding, we need to constantly reconfirm our understanding, so we do not find ourselves in the following situation (from an anonymous source):

I know you believe you understand what I said, but I don’t know if you realize what you heard wasn’t what I meant.

We hope those who attended the conference can refresh their memories through these papers and presentations. To the others who visit these pages, we seek to provide you with some additional useful resources to help you strengthen your implementation of lesson study.

Patsy Wang-Iverson and Makoto Yoshida

Resources

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