1. Lesson study is an exotic idea from a foreign country.
~ lesson study is teacher-directed, since teachers determine how to explore their chosen goals and
address student needs through their examination of practice
~Although lesson study is time-consuming, it can also be highly rewarding, so finding time for it is
not impossible once teachers have made a commitment to the practice.
~lesson study meetings can be run more efficiently by assigning roles
to group members, distributing materials for feedback beforehand
~The concern that lesson study will not allow practitioners to measure
and communicate their findings about student performance.
~While teachers may benefit from standardized outcome measures of
student learning, lesson study provides ongoing information that
allows teachers to continually tailor their teaching to their students'
learning needs.
~the collaborative nature of lesson study allows teachers to "fill in the blanks" for
one another, because the activity of planning a lesson together creates many opportunities for teachers to learn basic
content from their colleagues.
~lesson study is generally conducted in a way that shifts the focus from evaluating the
performance of the teacher to assessing the instruction. In addition, ownership of the lesson
is diffused across the group of teachers who planned the lesson.
~the focus is not on deciding which teaching philosophy is superior. Instead,
the focus is on trying out practices - representing any teaching philosophy - in actual classrooms and then determining
the success of these practices
1. Lesson study is about creating a unique, original, or never-seen-
before lesson.
~Parts of the lesson may be borrowed from a textbook, modified from
other lessons, or derived from the existing curriculum
~conduct lesson study for as many lessons as possible.
~By engaging in the formal process of lesson study, teachers will carry an
informal "lesson study mentality" into their daily practice
~a lesson can never be "perfect." The purpose of revising and re-teaching a
lesson is for teachers to reflect on what they learned from implementing the lesson in the classroom, what it taught them about the goal they set out to explore, and how to improve
their practice.
~The teachers who conduct lesson study plan their lessons with a
particular goal in mind and for the specific needs of their students and
classrooms.
~Like a map, lesson study is a tool for going somewhere. But the
important questions to keep in mind are where we want to go, how we
want to get there, and what signposts we will use along the way.
Once teachers make a commitment to professionalize their teaching
experiences, they can invite others to challenge them and help them
achieve their goals.
