Catherine Lewis, Rebecca Perry, and Jacqueline Hurd
While many U.S. educators are familiar with the individual features of lesson study, these are often not enough to create a sustained effort that has lasting impact. This paper explores what Catherine Lewis calls the "key pathways" of lesson study-means of translating the activities of the process into improved instruction. These pathways include an increased knowledge of subject matter, an increased knowledge of instruction, an increased ability to observe students, stronger collegial networks, stronger connection of daily practice to long-term goals, stronger motivation and sense of efficacy, and improved quality of available lesson plans. Examples from specific U.S. lesson-study efforts demonstrate how teachers—and ultimately, students—can benefit from this deeper, more informed approach.
When I ask a roomful of U.S. educators how many have seen schools discard a promising innovation before giving it a reasonable try, most or all hands shoot up. Educators volunteer many reasons why innovations are so quickly discarded: they may be watered down or misunderstood by the time they arrive at a school site; a few symbolic activities may be substituted for a more coherent whole, due to time or accountability pressures; or visible features may be implemented ritualistically without an understanding of their underlying rationale. These problems all point to the importance of understanding not only an innovation's visible features-like planning, observing, and discussing a lesson, in the case of lesson study-but also the essential pathways by which these features lead to instructional improvement.
Figure 1 illustrates what I believe to be a common U.S. misconception about lesson study: that it improves instruction primarily through the improvement of lesson plans (these misconceptions are discussed in greater depth in Chokshi & Fernandez, in press, and Lewis, 2001, 2002b). I infer this misconception from the questions that I am frequently asked about lesson study, such as "When do Japanese teachers decide a lesson is good enough to be disseminated?" and "If you just improve one lesson at a time, doesn't it take forever to get to the whole curriculum?" In contrast, Figure 2 illustrates what we believe to be key pathways from lesson study to instructional improvement, based on interviews with 100 Japanese educators over the past 10 years, as well as interviews with U.S. educators engaged in long-term lesson study efforts (Lewis, 2002a, 2000b; Lewis & Tsuchida 1997, 1998; Perry, Lewis & Akiba, 2002).
Understanding and building these pathways, and not just lesson study's visible features, is essential if schools are to give lesson study a reasonable try in the United States. This paper provides examples of each of these learning pathways. Many of these examples are drawn from San Mateo-Foster City (SMFC) School District in California, where a teacher-led lesson study effort emerged in 2000 and in the past 3 years has grown from 28 to 78 teachers.
Lesson study begins with the study of existing lesson plans and standards (Lewis, 2002b, Yoshida, 1999b). Teachers discuss the essential concepts and skills to be learned, compare their treatment in existing curricula, and consider what their students currently know, what they need to learn, and how they will respond to the planned lesson. As teachers engage in these activities, they naturally encounter many questions about subject matter, which may be answered through the group's own work or use of outside resources. When a group of teachers in SMFC planned a research lesson designed to help students distinguish among different kinds of triangles, one teacher initially visualized all scalene triangles as obtuse, leading the group to re-check reference materials:
Teacher 1: [Reading from material she brought in about triangles] "A scalene has no equal sides and an obtuse scalene has one angle larger than ninety degrees and no equal sides."
Teacher 2: I guess I always picture a scalene [triangle] with an obtuse angle.
Teacher 1: You know, we get locked into the pictures that are in the textbooks and we think that's that triangle.
Teachers in another California lesson study group had a sudden realization about the connection between a line's slope and its visual appearance when they changed the y-axis units (but not the x-axis units) in their lesson re-design and saw the line's appearance change: "I had always thought of slope and steepness as the same thing," said one team member, holding up an arm to illustrate tilt. Likewise, when Japanese teachers discussed a lesson in which fourth graders tried to speed up a solar-powered toy by "intensifying the light on the solar cell," a teacher made the following statement:
I want to know whether the three conditions the children described-"to put the battery closer to the light source," "to make the light stronger," and "to gather the light"-would all be considered the same thing by scientists. They don't seem the same to me. But I want to ask the teachers who know science whether scientists would regard them as the same thing.
Much of the knowledge gained during lesson study applies beyond the particular lesson and subject area under study. For example, in presenting a problem about pattern growth called "How Many Seats?" SMFC teachers noticed that the table they provided for students to record data actually deprived students of the crucially important work of figuring out how to organize the data themselves. They noted, "Our worksheet set it up for them, spoon-fed them," and "that messy business of organizing data is where they'll see the pattern." One team member summarized what she had learned from planning, observing, and revising the research lesson: "We have to have the students do the work, not us!" In their reflections at the end of the two-week mathematics and lesson study workshop, SMFC teachers described many realizations that have broad instructional implications, such as the importance of a carefully worded main problem to propel student interest, the need to make students "hungry" for new mathematics terminology, and the importance of seeing how students are using their prior knowledge.
During the research lesson, one lesson study team member teaches while the remaining team members collect data that has been agreed upon in advance, usually including detailed narrative records of the learning of several students-what they said and wrote, how they used the materials, and the supports or barriers to their learning during the lesson. A New Mexico teacher recounted how, when asked to divide a diamond into four equal parts and label each one with a fraction, the student she was observing labeled the parts "1/4," "1/3," "1/2," "1/0," on the logic that the denominator denoted the number of "remaining" pieces as each piece was counted. When the student noticed his labeling differed from that of those around him, he erased and corrected it, so that only the teacher observing him could grasp his interesting misconception about fractions. "What a gift," said the teacher, "to be able to document a student's learning over an entire period." Similarly, an SMFC teacher documenting student work during the "How Many Seats?" lesson noticed that student counting methods provided a window into student thinking about the problem:
I noticed kids counting the seats different ways, and this was a kind of a big "aha" for me…That's why I thought it might be helpful to have kids talking about how they're counting…watching how they use [the manipulatives] is going to tell us a lot about how they see the pattern.
Spurred by this observation, teachers in this group intensified their study of student counting methods during the next teaching of the research lesson and asked students to share different counting methods with the class, as a way to reveal their thinking about the problem. Looking back at the research lessons at a later meeting, one teacher remarked that she had not initially understood why students' counting methods were of interest, but she now saw that they could reveal student thinking about a problem. Her capacity to see student thinking had increased.
A common data-collection strategy during research lessons is to collect complete narrative data on several students who typify particular challenges faced by the school (for example, a student who is struggling with mathematics concepts, one who quickly finds the correct answer and becomes bored, and one who is an English language learner). Knowing that each of these students will be studied in depth often stimulates considerable attention to design of a lesson so that it will effectively reach learners of all backgrounds. When the research lesson is taught, teachers can compare their predictions about student thinking to students' actual thinking during the lesson and thereby gain direct feedback on their own knowledge of student thinking. Likewise, as they share their data with colleagues, teachers learn about facets of student behavior (such as counting) that may reveal student thinking. Especially at a time when many teachers feel pressured to "teach" particular standards and curricula, information about what students are actually learning is essential to instructional improvement (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Lewis, 2002a; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).
Lesson study can help to build a community of practice in which teachers routinely share resources and ideas. While the average Japanese teacher observes about 10 research lessons a year, U.S. teachers have few opportunities to observe lessons taught by others (Darling-Hammond & Ball, 1998; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Yoshida, 1999b). As a Japanese teacher said after a research lesson:
The research lesson is not over yet. It's not a one-time lesson; rather, it gives me a chance to continue consulting with other teachers. For example, I may say to other teachers, "I want to ask you about my last lesson you saw. . ." Then, the other teachers can provide me with concrete suggestions and advice because they have seen at least one lesson I conducted. We teachers can better connect with each other in this way.
Ideally, the interpersonal bridges built during lesson study enable collaboration well beyond the research lesson, increasing the coherence and consistency of the environment experienced by students. The habits of mind and heart that are fundamental to success in school-such as persistence, cooperation, responsibility, and willingness to work hard-develop over many years, in many classrooms (Lewis, 1995). As a Japanese elementary teacher explained, teachers cannot greatly improve children's lives except by working together as a whole faculty to provide a coherent, consistent environment for children's development. What is the use if children learn to "think like scientists" in one classroom, only to have those qualities devalued by their teacher in the next year? (Lewis, 2002b)
Americans are often surprised to find that, in Japan, lesson study usually begins with a long-term question, such as, "What kind of people do we hope our students will become?" Lesson study simultaneously addresses students' long-term development (like an eagerness to learn or a concern for others) and the content of a particular lesson and unit. For example, in the research lesson "Can You Lift 100 Kilograms"
(Mills College Lesson Study Group, 2000), Komae teachers gathered data not only on how students' thinking about levers progressed during the lesson, but also on whether students had "shining eyes," were "exclaiming under their breath," and were including the quietest students in their discussions. U.S. educators are sometimes puzzled by the dual focus on long-term goals and lesson goals, asking "Which is lesson study really about?" The answer is: both. Lesson study recognizes that the instruction possible in a given lesson is greatly shaped by students' motivation, sense of support from classmates, and other qualities of heart and mind, and that, conversely, motivation and collaboration are built through the daily experience of lessons.
To many U.S. educators, the connection of daily practice to long-term goals feels like the essential missing piece of instructional improvement. As one U.S. teacher commented, "A lot of [American] schools develop mission statements, but we don't do anything with them. The mission statements get put in a drawer, and then teachers become cynical because the mission statements don't go anywhere. Lesson study gives guts to a mission statement, makes it real, and brings it to life." Another U.S. teacher noted, " I really like how lesson study is connected to a larger goal; even the tiny details of the lesson don't seem mundane, because they are connected to a larger goal."
Richard Elmore (1999-2000) argues that U.S. education suffers not from a lack of supply of good programs, but a lack of demand for them. Successful lesson study efforts build grassroots demand for improvement among teachers. For example, SMFC teachers analyzing research lessons taught by colleagues remarked on the duration of students' attention span when confronted with a challenging and motivating problem. Lesson study can also strengthen teachers' sense of efficacy that improvement is possible:
One of the things that I really love about [lesson study] is that it puts a professional part back in teaching that we have to battle for all the time. …Being able to say 'This is like a science, and we can figure these things out and get better at them.' (Lewis, 2002b, p. 13)
An SMFC kindergarten teacher describes how her view of her own responsibilities shifted:
As a kindergarten teacher, I was always very focused on the standards. Of course, that was only the kindergarten state standards. ...And I always thought, "I like teaching Kindergarten because...I know enough. I don't need to learn any math. I know enough because I teach these five-year olds."...When I saw that first-grade example [of a lesson planned by Japanese teachers], they weren't thinking first grade math in their heads. I mean, they knew the standards all the way up. ...I feel like I've been teaching with such a narrow perspective. Like "This is all I need to know to teach them." I really didn't understand why, in the first week [of a two-week summer workshop], we kept spending an hour or two on geometry. I thought, "Who cares, I'm not going to teach this in kindergarten." And then I realized, "No, I need to know the whole picture."
Many instructional improvements fail to take hold because educators perceive them to be incompatible with their beliefs, values, or priorities. By exposing and incorporating teachers' individual beliefs, values, and priorities during the planning phase, lesson study can circumvent a common roadblock to improvement.
The "How Many Seats?" lesson discussed above, which "spoon-fed" children by giving them a t-chart to organize their data, became a much more challenging lesson once students were asked to devise their own means to record data. Students were then able to organize data and grasp the geometric reason behind a numerical pattern, rather than simply identify the numerical pattern from a t-chart. Although this revised lesson plan undoubtedly provides a better starting point for future teaching about patterns, it captures only a slice of what the teachers on this lesson study team learned through lesson study.
The visible features of lesson study shown at the left of Figure 2-well-designed processes of goal-setting, research lesson planning, data collection, discussion, and revision-are essential to lesson study. Careful study of available protocols (Lewis, 2002; www.teacherscollege.edu/lessonstudy/; www.globaledresources.com/) will help U.S. educators understand how these lesson study activities differ from the lesson planning and observation familiar to them. In some settings, careful implementation of the visible features of lesson study may gradually and naturally build the learning pathways shown in the center of Figure 2. But where this is not the case, it is important for educators to see the learning pathways-not just the visible features-as essential elements of lesson study. If lesson study is to avoid the fate of so many other once-promising innovations, U.S. educators must conceive of lesson study not just as a set of activities, but as building pathways that enable continuous growth of the knowledge, interpersonal resources, and motivation needed to improve instruction in one's own classroom and more broadly.
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