As lesson study is implemented at various sites throughout the United States, a number of inconsistencies and misconceptions have arisen. The 2003 Lesson Study Conference aimed to begin developing a common understanding of the lesson study process within the lesson study community. Such a common vision is necessary in order to ensure that lesson study is a cohesive, concrete, and consistent process across all sites. Only through developing a common understanding can we truly hope to discover how lesson study impacts student outcomes in the U.S. Through the voices of seven panelists, this paper seeks to build a common understanding of what lesson study really is through examining some of its misconceptions and to start thinking about some of the factors that influence the lesson study process.
Alice Gill
Over the past few years, I have heard a number of people say, "We are doing lesson study." When I ask them what they mean, they say that they plan a lesson together, or discuss a videotape lesson, or look at standards to plan a lesson. They may also say that they discuss student work together or that they observe a demonstration lesson. They equate these things with lesson study.
You will hear that there is not one rigid form of lesson study in Japan. However, I believe there is one comprehensive form of lesson study that has the greatest potential to help American teachers. (See the 2002 conference paper Overview of Lesson Study in Japan). In some way, that comprehensive form encompasses all of the things already mentioned: planning a lesson together, discussing a videotaped lesson, looking at standards, discussing student work, observing demonstration lessons, and more. But there is a great difference between looking at those components individually and putting them together.
This comprehensive form of lesson study targets both the big picture and the small details. Some of the conference workshops focus on how to get the big picture of the content students are studying, how it is developed, and how you can teach it (see Improving the Quality of Lesson Study: Learning to Become Kyozaikenkyu Practitioners, Evolution of Thinking during Lesson Planning, and Guided Lesson Planning Activities in Mathematics). But in addition to the big picture, you also need to focus on those micro elements-things that I was never taught and never even thought would make a difference in whether kids learn or what they understand from the lessons we produce. For example, lesson study groups in Japan consider very carefully what numbers to use in order to set up a problem for multiple solutions. One group designed a special manipulative that would push students to decompose the same factor in a multiplication problem so it would be easy at the end of the lesson to make a point about the distributive property. So a comprehensive form of lesson study targets both the big picture and the small details, focusing on subject matter, pedagogy, and instructional materials in the context of student learning.
What most sets this form of lesson study apart is that it is both comprehensive and a dynamic process. Take, for example, lesson study's process of observing a classroom lesson. This might be simulated by looking at a videotape of a lesson, but when you watch a videotape, you see what the videographer wants you to see—where he or she focuses his camera—but you cannot see or hear what might be happening in a corner of the classroom. Similarly, looking at a piece of student work might seem as rich in data as lesson observation, but when you look at a piece of student work, you make a lot of guesses about what was going on in the student's head to produce that piece of work. However, when you are in the classroom, observing a lesson developed through lesson study, there is much more information or data you can analyze. You can watch students in the process of learning and reacting directly to the task before them—to what the teacher is doing and saying and to the conversations students are having with their peers—and you have better access to what they are thinking. While other forms of professional development are still valid and useful, there is an exponential difference in the kind of learning that can result from the dynamic process of lesson study.
Putting together all the components of the lesson study process results in a comprehensive professional development practice that can reach beyond implementing a handful of isolated components. While a full-scale lesson study practice may take several years to develop, it is important when we ask "are we doing lesson study yet?" that we are all targeting a form of the process that is comprehensive, dynamic, and focused on student learning.
Clea Fernandez
If we want to build a common understanding of lesson study, we need to realize that doing lesson study is not synonymous with learning to teach like the Japanese. My contact with lesson study groups has led me to realize that, for many, the answer to the question "Are we doing lesson study yet?" is whether they are teaching the way Japanese teachers do.
Conflating these ideas is not surprising, given the history of how lesson study was introduced to and popularized in the United States. Despite some wonderful earlier scholarly work, most people learned about lesson study through The Teaching Gap (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), a book that described lesson study and also reported the results of the TIMSS study, where Japanese teaching practices were a great focus. As a result, in the minds of many in the U.S., lesson study and Japanese-style teaching have been considered one and the same.
However, thinking of lesson study in these terms could lead us astray in several important ways. It gives us tunnel vision, in that we look only to Japan for ideas about good teaching practices. No doubt Japanese teachers provide us with great ideas to ponder and to try out in our classrooms, but so might teachers in lots of corners of the world, or even in our own back yard. In equating lesson study with Japanese-style teaching, we severely limit the scope of what we consider possible models of good teaching, and it seems that we do not yet understand enough about teaching and learning to be able to afford to become so narrow in our views.
Instead, we need to use lesson study to question, challenge, and evaluate even those practices that are not in vogue today, to ensure that in our desire to improve teaching we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Thinking of lesson study as a way to teach Japanese style focuses on producing a particular type of practice, rather than the real goal-learning how to put in place a process for the continual evaluation and renewal of teaching. In the worst-case scenario, trying to emulate the Japanese can lead to mimicry that is devoid of deep thinking and a sense of purpose. In the best-case scenario, it can help teachers to think about and explore interesting and often very novel teaching ideas.
However, I am certain that in twenty years Japanese teaching will look very different from how it looks today. And that is precisely because they are doing lesson study. It is impossible for us here in the U.S. to know what will be the needs and the dispositions of future generations of children to come through our schools. We certainly should not assume that what we do today is what we will need to do tomorrow to serve children well. Lesson study is a tool for bridging our changing needs across time, but not if we see it merely as a way to learn about a particular way of teaching.
Catherine Lewis
Many of us have seen a promising educational innovation discarded before it had a real chance to take root. When we learn something new, it is natural to start with the most obvious features and then deepen our conceptual understanding from there. But often in education we try out the superficial features of a new innovation and then discard the approach before we have had a chance to understand the deep, underlying principles.
An example is mathematics manipulatives. The whole idea of reform mathematics became embodied in one of its surface features: manipulatives. People thought that if they were doing mathematics with manipulatives then they were doing reform mathematics. The underlying principles, such as using manipulatives to support mathematical thinking and discussion, were lost. Similarly, ideas of progressive education were sometimes simplified to mean tearing down the walls between classrooms rather than exploring the deeper principles of experience-based learning.
What can we do to avoid the superficial implementation of lesson study? It is very important to see the connections between the surface features of lesson study—the visible features like planning, doing a research lesson, and discussing student data—and the deeper, underlying pathways by which lesson study has an impact on instructional improvement. Those pathways can include an increased ability to observe and understand student thinking, increased content knowledge and instructional knowledge, stronger collegial networks, motivation, connection of daily practice to long-term goals, and improved quality of lesson plans. Most of these pathways relate to how teachers learn during lesson study. (See the conference paper How Do Teachers Learn During Lesson Study?)
These are five practical strategies that teachers on the West Coast have used to strengthen one pathway between lesson study and instructional improvement. Linking the surface, visible features of lesson study to what I call the key learning pathways will enable us to get beyond superficial implementation of lesson study. These pathways are critical to the instructional improvement that we all want to see.
Makoto Yoshida
When implementing lesson study, we have to consider a variety of goals: goals for the school, goals for the unit, goals for standardized tests, and so on. There are also many goals for an individual lesson, such as subject content, student thinking, and learning skills. My question is: how do we reconcile these goals? When we do lesson study, we establish our lesson study goals, but are we using them? When we engage in lesson planning, we tend to focus on what we want to teach and forget about the larger goals, such as the lesson study goal or the school goal. So what do we do? Are we just going through the motions of establishing these goals?
Having a goal is very important to planning a better lesson. How we want to connect the various goals relates to how to plan a lesson. Clear goals lead to planning more focused, logical, and coherent lessons with measurable outcomes; it also leads to a better understanding of and support for our students, as well as better discussion and evaluation of the lesson. Clear goals can help us evaluate whether we have achieved our objectives. All of this leads to better learning by students and teachers.
Different lesson study groups can be set up to achieve different kinds of goals. For example, school-based lesson study can strive to develop a common vision of education to achieve systemic and consistent instructional change. (See the 2002 conference paper Whole-School Lesson Study as the Basis for Whole-School Research). District-wide lesson study can achieve these same results for an entire district. Finally, lesson study conducted by study groups can develop new ideas for teaching and learning in chosen topics, as well as investigate curriculum and content to develop new curriculum. But it is important to think about why we are setting up certain goals during lesson study and what we really want to achieve through these goals as a study group, school, or district.
Tad Watanabe
In my own casual observation of many U.S. lesson study groups, the same individual serves as both the lesson study facilitator and the knowledgeable other. It is important to explore the potential advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement, so that we can take advantage of the strengths it offers, but also minimize the potential risks.
In terms of potential advantages, the facilitator is often much closer to the lesson study group and is able to attend the group meetings on a regular basis, whereas a knowledgeable other may be located farther away and less able to attend meetings. Because of their proximity, facilitators often already enjoy relationships with the teachers that can deepen the lesson study process.
Potential disadvantages are that facilitators do not always have the expertise needed for that particular lesson study group or are not always adequately familiar with the lesson study process. They may have read The Teaching Gap (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999) and attended lesson study conferences, but if their understanding of lesson study is shallow, then their facilitation of the lesson study group will also be limited in scope.
The expertise needed by the lesson study group can also change over time. The facilitator may have had sufficient expertise when the lesson study group started, but if the focus of the lesson study group shifts, that same facilitator may not be able to provide the kind of expertise that the lesson study group needs.
Having one individual serve as both facilitator and knowledgeable other may be unique to the United States, and I hope this is because of the lack of accessible knowledgeable others at present, and not because the lesson study practitioners are disregarding the importance of a knowledgeable other. A lack of accessible knowledgeable others in the U.S. raises issues. One is the need for professional development to help educate potential knowledgeable others on the lesson study process and the role that knowledgeable others play in it. A second need may be a database that lists knowledgeable others who are willing and available to work with study groups.
The integration of knowledgeable others into the lesson study process should be an important component in developing a common vision for lesson study. Understanding the benefits that knowledgeable others can bring is the first step in understanding their importance. (See the conference 2002 paper The Role of Knowledgeable Others.) From this common understanding, lesson study practitioners can consider the roles that facilitators and knowledgeable others are playing, and what can be done to maximize the benefit each brings to the group.
Patsy Wang-Iverson
I have the sense that some people think that lesson study is only about what I am calling the "big show"—a one-time performance of a lesson—and all the energy it takes to prepare for outsiders to come and observe this show. Because so much time and effort are put into this process, people tend to make limited connections to what will happen the next day in the classroom. We pay little attention to the fact that the purpose of lesson study is to inform daily teaching. How can we make this purpose part of the common understanding that we all share of lesson study?
If we think back to lesson study open houses we have attended, we have probably all experienced a post-lesson debriefing session in which the focus of comments is on the teacher's performance or simply how "great" the lesson was. But to impact daily teaching, we must remember that the debriefing sessions should focus on sharing data observers have collected on student thinking and learning. Debriefing sessions should discuss the evidence of student understanding (or misunderstanding) in the observed lesson and concrete strategies on how to improve the impact on student learning and how to apply these recommendations to daily teaching.
All components of lesson study-not just the open house lesson-should be geared toward improving daily teaching. To achieve this goal, lesson study demands that we become researchers. I have been learning about lesson study with teachers from the Paterson Public School No. 2 in Paterson, New Jersey, and have attended several open house lessons and debriefing sessions. By now, the staff knows that when they say a lesson was "great," I will ask them to quantify that statement using data. Part of coming to a common understanding of lesson study is learning how to quantify feedback, what it means to collect data, and what types of questions we should be asking. So instead of simply saying "I liked that" or "I didn't like that," we can explore what it means to use data and become researchers throughout all phases of the lesson study practice.
As researchers, we need to keep foremost in our minds that the purpose of lesson study is to inform our daily teaching. While daily teaching usually occurs in the isolation of our own classrooms, lesson study is a way to break down that isolation and bring in outside knowledge. That outside knowledge comes from the collective research and findings that lesson study makes possible—research conducted with our teaching colleagues, principals, and knowledgeable others. Bringing that knowledge back into our daily teaching takes us beyond "going through the motions" of lesson study to actually seeing an impact on student learning.
One final thought on the purpose of lesson study to inform our daily teaching: Teachers who have taught lesson study lessons may attest that the experience of teaching a lesson that is observed by others had a greater impact on their daily teaching than simply being part of the planning and writing team. Having colleagues share what they see is very helpful, because it is so hard to step outside of yourself in your own classroom to observe your interactions with students. For this reason, I encourage teachers to volunteer to teach a lesson study lesson. Those teachers who participate by planning and observing a lesson learn a great deal too, but it is the teacher who actually teaches the planned lesson who derives the greatest benefit.
Akihiko Takahashi
How can lesson study impact teaching? I am fortunate to have witnessed how lesson study has changed Japanese teaching since the early 1980s when I started teaching, and is still changing Japanese teaching today. When I was a kid, I was taught mathematics in a very traditional step-by-step way. The teacher would show an example, and I would be given a lot of exercises.
Since then, lesson study investigations have helped mathematics teaching in Japan to evolve from a "teaching by telling" and "skill and drill" approach to include more concept-based problem-solving approaches to teaching and learning. These concept-based problem-solving approaches, which encourage student thinking and exploration, are depicted in the analysis of the Japanese mathematics classrooms that participated in the TIMSS 1995 video study (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000). How did lesson study prompt this evolution?
The evolution occurred through careful, systematic debate during lesson study in the 1980s as teachers, administrators, and knowledgeable others discussed what student learning should look like. We used research-including much educational research from the United States-to inform our ideas. For example, one lesson study discussion focused on how to teach students to find the area of a triangle. Based on research about student learning, we decided we did not want to simply impose the formula on students. We realized that students might not understand the formula conceptually, so we tried to help them derive the formula themselves in order to arrive at a conceptual understanding.
If students are to understand how to derive formulas for different shapes, then the sequence of shapes they study becomes very important. After students explore the concepts of the area of rectangles and squares, they might then be able to derive easily the formula for finding the area of a right triangle. However, this does not mean that students can derive a generalized formula for any other triangle. Thus, studying the area of triangles after that of rectangles and squares may not be the best sequence. In Japan, students study the area of parallelograms after learning about the area of rectangles. This sequence (studying the area of rectangles, parallelograms, and then triangles) allows students to develop the generalized formula for the area of any triangle.
By using lesson study to conduct research, define our goals, examine our scope and sequence, and closely study the instructional materials we were using to achieve our goals, I gained a deeper knowledge of mathematics teaching and how students learn mathematics. (See the conference paper Improving the Quality of Lesson Study: Learning to Become Kyozaikenkyu Practitioners.) This is just one very small example of the mathematics learning issues we discussed during lesson study that contributed to the evolution of mathematics teaching in Japan.
This paper was first published online in July 2004.
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