Lesson Study for Learning Community

A guide to sustainable school reform

Eisuke Saito, Masatsugu Murase, Atsushi Tsukui, John Yeo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317803782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Lesson Study has been actively introduced from Japan to various parts of the world, starting with the US. Such introduction is heavily connected with a focus on mathematics education and there is a strong misconception that Lesson Study is only for mathematics or science. The introduction is usually done at the departmental or form level and there has been a strong question about its sustainability in schools.

This book comprehensively explores the idea of Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) and suggests that reform for the culture of the school is needed in order to change learning levels among the children, teachers and even parents. In order for this to happen, the ways of management and leadership are also included as objectives of LSLC, as are practices at the classroom level. It argues that LSLC is a comprehensive vision and framework of school reform and needs to be taken up in a holistic way across disciplines. Chapters include:

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• How to Create Time

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• How to Build the Team

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• How to Promote Reform

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• How to Reform Daily Lessons

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• How to Conduct a Research Lesson

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• How to Discuss Observed Lessons

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• How to Sustain School Reform based on LSLC

Strong interest in LSLC is already prevalent in Asian countries, such as Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore and is now being introduced more in the west. This book will be of great interest to those involved in education policy and reform, and for practitioners of education at all levels.

1

WHAT IS LESSON STUDY FOR LEARNING COMMUNITY (LSLC)?

Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) had a humble beginning in a single man’s vision to defend public school against a quick succession of top-down school reforms across Japan (Sato, 2008). Professor Manabu Sato believed firmly in the urgent need to revitalise education and started a grass-root initiative against the hegemony of neoliberal educational policies in the early 1980s that eventually led to the creation of learning communities among educators. Anchored in the vision that the school must be made of communities of learners at all levels with every other agenda organised around this and a doctrine that brings learning to the fore, LSLC promotes an environment where children learn together, teachers are respected as professionals modelling learning, and parents within the larger community come together and participate in the restoration of education. Such a learning community requires collaborative learning in all classrooms and encourages collegiality in the staffrooms with partnership among teachers being a critical component of success.

This book captures the experience and the unrelenting efforts of those pioneers who have successfully proven that LSLC can be an excellent vehicle to transform schools. This book explicates comprehensively the way LSLC restores the meaning of education in schools by systematically building the learning capacities of students, teachers, administrators, and even parents and other stakeholders. Such a trans-formation may sound too good to be true but the progress of reform in more than 3,000 Japanese schools (Sato, 2012), in addition to schools in China, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam today, is testimony that it is possible. These schools have gradually moved from merely imparting skills and content to being active communities that live out the experience of true learning. In a keynote presentation in 2008, Professor Sato exclaimed, ‘the school is a miracle place where every child and every teacher can find his/her best way of learning’ (Sato, 2008).

Why LSLC?

International attention on lesson study

Effective professional learning is a long-term commitment and it is best conducted in a school community that promotes learning for all. Lesson study as an approach to teacher professional development emphasises both these elements: long-term practice and an implicit belief in the efficacy of learning. It therefore resonates with the emerging consensus that programmes should be based on the understanding that professional development is continuing, active, social and related to practice (Webster-Wright, 2009). Darling-Hammond (1997) has pointed out that professional development linked to student learning and curricular reform must be deeply embedded in the daily life of schools. This requires an examination of the teachers’ practices on a daily basis. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2001) reported that communities supporting inquiry would develop their own histories, and in a certain sense, their own culture in which teachers would share discourses, experiences and a set of procedures to lend structure to their shared experiences.

In order to develop such a community or culture, it is increasingly important for teachers to mutually observe and jointly reflect on practices at the classroom level. This is because teachers tend to obtain most of their ideas through actual practice – both their own and their colleagues’ (Barth, 1990; Joyce and Showers, 2002; Grierson and Gallagher, 2009). Further, observations and reflections on teaching practices, if appropriately performed, would help teachers to jointly pose questions regarding the problems they face, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the work of others to develop generative frameworks and attempt to make visible most of what is taken for granted about teaching and learning (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2001).

In 1999 Stigler and Hiebert made a phenomenal international impact on educators, especially in the US, with the publication of their book, The Teaching Gap. Their findings showed how LS helped to enhance teachers’ learning and provided a -possible clue to understanding the substantial gap between the US and the Japanese mathematics achievement scores in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study (TIMSS). They claimed that despite the introduction of group work and the apparent belief among American teachers that they had adopted a social constructivist pedagogical approach, in reality few changes were noted in the style of children’s learning (Hiebert and Stigler, 2000). In addition, they found few changes in teachers’ goals toward deeper mathematical understanding (Hiebert and Stigler, 2000). Educators and policy makers thought that perhaps LS might be the key to explaining this disparity and useful to the design of curriculum reform in schools (Council for Basic Education, 2000; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2001; Lewis, 2002). This was during a period when national education in the US was in crisis with many pressing issues needing to be addressed. LS began to make inroads into teacher education programmes and serious attention was paid to testing it on an academic level.

Under these circumstances and in combination with the call for professional development that is more school-based and grounded in daily realities, scholars introduced lesson study as a Japanese professional development method, denouncing conventional one-time professional development activities and emphasising the importance of a sustained and practical approach (Lewis and Tsuchida, 1998; Stigler and Hiebert, 1999).

Lesson study is described as a process consisting of the following steps: (1) collaboratively planning the study lesson; (2) implementing the study lesson; (3) discussing the study lesson; (4) revising the lesson plan (optional); (5) teaching the revised version of the lesson (optional); and (6) sharing thoughts about the revised version of the lesson (Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004). In the US and other developed countries, the development of knowledge in teachers is usually taken as the major reason for the introduction of LS and there is a tendency for small groups of teachers to start up LS (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wang-Iverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007) but not necessarily to involve the entire school in the process (Saito, 2012). Joint planning has been richly discussed in US LS literature but not very much has been said about how to capture children and their learning (Saito, 2012). However, since the 1980s, educational environments in the US have become increasingly challenging and troublesome. In fact, such problems had actually necessitated the emergence of LS in Japan too. We will now move on to discuss these problems that have captured the attention of educators around the world, the limitations of subject-oriented LS, as well as the background to why LSLC was started in Japan as a countermeasure to these challenges.

Teachers’ challenges: dealing with motivational issues

Since the 1980s, a safer environment to assure learning has become a need around the world. Children’s problematic behaviours have been a major issue in education in developed countries and the responses towards such behaviours taken by the school managers are likely to be punitive ones (Utley et al., 2002). In such schools, obviously, children’s learning is likely to be disturbed and to result in lower performance (Leithwood, Harris and Strauss, 2010). In response to such a situation, the authorities in many Western countries have established more neoliberal reform to let schools compete in a ranking system with the expectation that such competition would push schools to satisfy conditions and standards set by the authorities (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009).

At the same time there is a concern for an alternative to punitive approaches towards problematic behaviours of children. There are increasing numbers of practices and knowledge bodies that demonstrate the importance of proactive and preventive interventions, with emphasis on reciprocal, caring and positive school behaviours (Lassen, Steel and Sailor, 2006). Questions were asked about the overemphasis on ranking based on academic achievement and how that influences teaching and learning processes. Wrigley (2003) points out that direct instruction for merit only does not help children become interested in nor motivated about learning – successful learning should take more collaborative forms based on group learning.

This move is pertinent because one-way instruction in traditional modes does not benefit children. Such a style of education – called the banking concept of education by Freire (1970) – forces learners to memorise items. The alternative approaches suggest the importance of collaboration among children and between children and teachers (Webb, 2013), based on mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together (Roschelle and Teaseley, 1995). Further, it is important to note that it is not only children in lowly performing schools that need a change of instruction. Those in highly performing schools are just as alienated by traditional classroom practices for they find no meaning in memorisation (Sidorkin, 2004).

Leithwood et al. (2010) claim that when children with lower socio-economic status (SES) form the majority in a school their achievements tend to be lower. Such children are victims of the pressure of socio-economic gaps. There is a greater risk for such children to experience poverty, malnutrition, domestic violence, or divorce of parents (Wong et al., 2013). Ethnic discrimination can be another factor to consider in multi-cultural societies. In New South Wales, Australia, for example, there is a spontaneous tendency for Western and non-Western students to segregate themselves in the choice of schools to attend. This is mainly due to neo-liberal policies of school choice which sadly mitigates against the building up of mixed communities (Sweller, Graham and Bergen, 2012). Such a tendency further produces and reproduces segregation and labelling, an insidious social stigma upon children and their schools. Likewise, as the competition under neo-liberal economic reform intensifies in general and the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, more people would experience severely deprived life situations. This means there will be more children with such difficulties coming to schools. Again, the question is how to turn children’s attention to learning under such difficult circumstances? Furthermore, the other question is how much have academics responded to such a need – particularly in connecting the details of the learning situation of children with daily classroom practices?

Issues of subject-oriented lesson study

From such a perspective, we notice there are some issues in the way previous research in LS was done. First, their research was likely to be conducted in schools where disruptive issues as demonstrated above do not arise, or researchers would not have much interest in such issues. In previous research, much attention was paid to the knowledge of teachers in subject matter and teaching (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wang-Iverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007). In the situation of schools where children escape from learning, teachers need to start by struggling with the problem of keeping such children inside the classrooms and getting them ready for lessons. Teachers in such schools can be worn out simply trying to keep children quiet and making them pay attention to what teachers say. However, in the literature on subject-oriented LS hitherto, such kinds of disruption issues and the measures taken to remedy them have seldom been discussed. All of them do discuss how to teach a particular subject as communities (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wang-Iverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007) – yet there are so many problems to be faced before one can reach that stage.

Secondly, in a subject-oriented LS framework, the participation of teachers is confined at a partial level and not the entire school. Lim et al. (2011) find that in the 66 per cent of Singaporean schools where teachers conduct LS the participation rate of LS is less than 40 per cent of the entire school teachers. Furthermore, much research focuses on certain subjects only, mathematics being the usual one (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007). So there is a great possibility that there is a gap between teachers who are engaged in LS and those who are not.

The need to engage the entire school in order to change classroom practices has been pointed out by academics. Hargreaves calls the schism inside the school ‘Balkanisation’ and says that it hinders the process of school reform. Ainscow, Barrs and Martin (1998) claim that it is likely to be difficult to collaborate and share innovation across subject departments. Kyriakides (2005) points out that a difference between effective schools and non-effective schools is that there is a smaller variance in practices in effective schools. So within the framework of subject-oriented LS, it is hard to address these issues.

Thirdly, there is the question of how to deprivatise practices under the framework of subject-oriented LS. It is inevitable, from a systemic perspective, that under this type of LS framework joint planning is conducted and mutual observation of each other’s practices is not frequently done (Saito, 2012). However, Leithwood et al. (2010) underline the importance of mutual observation and reflection to change the situation in badly performing schools. There is a strong need for teachers to actually know what children are like and how they learn in different subjects. Teachers need to modify their teaching strategies impromptu when faced with unexpected responses from children. The more professional teachers can do this instantly (Sato, Akita and Iwakawa, 1993) but skills need to be sharpened through observation and mutual reflection as often as possible. Particularly, as Kitada (2007) points out, teachers hone their skills through listening to expert teachers’ narratives and reflection as often as they can. In the subject-oriented LS framework, there is likely to be a scarcity of such opportunities.

History of LSLC

The beginning of LSLC in Japan

Since the 1980s the situation in schools has gradually grown violent and Manabu Sato realised that there would be a huge backlash against school education and teachers (Sato, 2005). He intuitively sensed that it would become a question about democracy in schools and there would be a strong demand for reorganising and reforming schools as democratic communities but this could only come from within (Sato, 2005). Thus he kept doing action research with teachers and eventually in 1996, published a book, entitled Critique on Curriculum, which sets out the vision and philosophical foundation of LSLC.

In response to Sato’s vision and philosophy of LSLC three pilot primary schools pioneered the approach: Hamanogo, Ojiya and Hiromi. However, before going into detail about the trials in these schools, we need to understand the background to that period.

Japanese society was undergoing a particularly tough time as the nineties drew to a close. In the 1980s, the Japanese economy had been very strong; it gave rise to what was called the ‘Bubble Economy’. Japanese products were in great demand and sold well abroad. The yen grew in strength. The employment rate was high and graduates could find jobs very easily. Life-long employment was regarded as almost guaranteed and few people had any doubts it would always be there. It would have been hard for anyone to imagine being sacked in the middle of his career if he had not done anything wrong.

However, the Bubble Economy ended in 1990 and the Japanese economy began to slow down from the very beginning of that year. At the start, it was still not very widely felt but by the middle of the 1990s there was no escape from the obvious. When the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997 it made a great impact on people’s lives. Even white collar workers who had always been assured of employment until they came to retirement age were subjected to retrenchment and early dismissal.

This traumatic change in socio-economic realities had an immense impact on the educational aspirations of the times. Within Japanese society the chief motivation or justification for the pursuit of education had been the assurance of financial stability in later life. The assumption was that if one studied hard one would make it to a good high school and then later, to a well-known university, and of course, following graduation, one would get a job with a renow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is lesson study for learning Community (LSLC)?
• 2 What kind of school can be created by reform under LSLC?
• 3 How to create time
• 4 How to build the team
• 5 How to promote reform
• 6 How to reform daily lessons
• 7 How to conduct a research lesson
• 8 How to discuss observed lessons
• 9 How to sustain school reform based on LSLC
• References
• Index