Many
coaches find that working with grade-level or content-area teams boosts their
impact. The structure provided by Lesson
Study can be an effective support for team work.
Lesson
Study is practice-based professional learning that works directly on developing
home-grown, contextualized knowledge and improving instruction. In the Lesson
Study model, teachers, usually of the same grade level or course, meet
regularly to collaborate and plan lessons that become the focus of inquiry for
effective teaching practices.
As
part of the Lesson Study process, a lesson is crafted and then one teacher
teaches the lesson while other members of the group observe. The lesson is then
collaboratively revised and taught by other members of the group. During Lesson Study, teachers have the
opportunity to try out new instructional routines and refine and recalibrate their
teaching as effective practices are identified within specific lessons and
become generalized. By starting with
their own ideas, Lesson Study opens teachers to critique, learning, and an
expansion of their instructional repertoire. By making teaching public and
collaborative, teachers learn from their own practice, from others, and from
research—both their own and studies in the field. This method of “growing your
own” professional development impacts teachers’ pedagogical and content
knowledge and empowers them as instructional decision makers.
I’ve
used this approach fluidly, following loosely the guidelines provided by Hurd
and Lewis in Lesson
Study Step by Step. The approach
encourages reflection, collaboration and re-visioning of practice. When I worked with a fifth-grade team (Allie,
Kim, Linda, and Alice) to boost students’ writing skills, Lesson Study opened
their eyes to new possibilities. After observing a lesson on organization,
Allie said, “I seriously couldn’t believe that (students) could group those
ideas!” They explored, rather than being told, what worked. Linda said,
“(Lesson Study) honestly has changed the whole direction of where we were going
to go.” Kim verified, “I think it has made a million times difference.” Allie
saw Lesson Study as a process of improvement. She said, “Now that we’ve done
this cycle, I mean it’s just like anything, once you’ve done it and tried it,
it’s going to go better the next time.” These teachers’ writing instruction was
transformed because of their shared experiences.
When
coaches facilitate collaboration using structures such as Lesson Study, their
impact is accelerated as they help the whole team go!
This
week, you might want to take a look at:
A
video about Lesson Study as a collaborative model for professional development:
Vocabulary strategies for English
Language Learners:
Fun food poems for young
poets:
or for older students:
DIY sentence rearranging manipulative
(a great PD make-and-take):
The power of practice in achieving
goals:
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