To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser

Back to Graphic Version

Singing a New Tune:
Lesson Study

On a prototypical overcast May morning in Olympia, Washington, an atypical scene unfolds in a Meadows Elementary classroom. As sixth-grade teacher Mary Holmberg introduces her students to the day’s math lesson, a throng of adults lines the perimeter of the room, notebooks and pens at the ready. Holmberg’s students shift nervously in their seats, acutely aware of the visitors, but pretending to ignore them.

Holmberg, a veteran teacher, moves gracefully through her instructions with just a hint of added formality and intensity, something like a choir director leading students through their first public performance. But with this performance there is one nerve-racking difference: This is a song the students have never sung before, a math lesson that is introducing a new concept. The teachers, administrators, professional development trainers, and other adults that have shoehorned themselves into this classroom are not here to see how well the students perform, but how—and how effectively—the lesson guides the students to an understanding of a new concept.

Holmberg created this morning’s lesson—on developing a formula for a pattern involving two or more arithmetic operations—during several planning sessions with her fellow grade-level teachers, Merle Hom and Karen Daily, and the help of a professional development trainer. Normally, this “research” or “study” lesson would be observed only by this planning team, one outside expert, and perhaps a cadre of teachers from other grade levels. In this case, Holmberg has bravely agreed to model lesson study as part of a large symposium, organized by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory to spread the word about the type of professional development that Meadows Elementary teachers have been conducting during the past year.

Lesson study, or jugyokenku as it’s called in Japanese, is not new. It has been central to Japanese professional development efforts for many years and has also been the focus of research and training in the United States in the past five years. Despite these efforts, it has failed to gain widespread acceptance in our country, a fact that many observers attribute to a kind of “lost in translation” cultural divide, or even to a stubborn xenophobia on the part of U.S. educators.

In reality, lesson study requires no translation at all. What it does require is a fundamental shift in thinking for many educators, regardless of their nationality. As the Lesson Study Research Group at Columbia University has written, “In lesson study, the focus is on the concrete examination of practice and the testing of new ideas in actual classrooms.” It is a practice in which teachers are encouraged “to see themselves as researchers conducting an empirical examination, organized around asking questions about practice and designing classroom experiments to explore these questions.”

As Holmberg turns her students loose on the morning’s task, the “concrete examination” aspect of lesson study is hard to miss. While the students go to work in small groups, abuzz with focused energy, the adults in the room are equally busy. They hover around the tables looking over the students’ shoulders, scribbling notes furiously. Toward the end of the period, groups of students are asked to present their answers and to show how they arrived at them. Then the bell rings, and everyone makes a noisy exodus. For the teachers, the lesson is only beginning. Later, they will meet for a debriefing where—following a formal protocol—they will share their observations and listen to the detailed comments of the trainer and all other observers. The debriefing will remain firmly focused on the effectiveness of the lesson, rather than on the teacher’s style or other variables. “Was the goal of the lesson achieved? Did the students who began with charts rather than with the manipulatives really understand the equation? Did they see the pattern? What misconceptions did they have?”

By the end, the lesson study group will have formed new research questions that will focus the revision of the lesson. Typically, another teacher in the group will then reteach the lesson to a different group of students, with further observation and another debriefing.

As Holmberg, Hom, and Daily wrap up the morning’s session you can see a mix of emotions in their faces—exhaustion and exhilaration, relief and a realization that much work lies ahead. What you don’t see is boredom or the glazed look of teachers who have just endured another meaningless training session. In this training they have been full participants—teachers and learners, researchers and practitioners, directors of the choir and singers of the song.