Lesson Study

Professional learning for our time

Peter Dudley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134460489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book introduces readers to the development of Lesson Study (LS) in the UK, making historical connections to the growth of Lesson Study in Japan, East Asia, the US and Europe. It explains how to conduct LS in schools and educational institutions, providing examples of compelling, externally evaluated impact outcomes for both primary learners and teacher learners, and vivid exemplars of LS in action across age ranges and curricular contexts.

Each chapter presents international research outcomes that clearly demonstrate how and why LS has a place within teacher learning approaches that have the greatest impact and the greatest capacity building potential for creating outstanding teaching. This is supported by primary research evidence, and linked with contemporary and recent high quality research worldwide into pupil learning, teacher learning, school improvement and system improvement. The book illustrates the diverse application of LS for innovating or transferring highly effective practices in a variety of contexts to boost learning for children with a range of challenges and specific needs.

Lesson Study provides a global perspective on the development of LS worldwide, exploring its impact on innovation, creativity, curricula and achievement in a variety of contexts. It will be of key interest to practitioners in schools and teacher education institutions, researchers, and policy and decision-makers at local, national and international levels. The book's explicit focus on the leadership of local authorities will also make it valuable reading for all leaders of professional development and school improvement.

Chapter 1 How Lesson Study works and why it creates excellent learning and teaching

Peter Dudley

DOI: 10.4324/9780203795538-1

I agree with Charles Desforges in his Foreword that Lesson Study (LS) is an approach to continuing professional development (CPD) that schools should adopt. There is a lot to commend it and to evidence its distinctive impact compared with other forms of CPD as you will read within these pages. Studies of how LS is being used to best effect and of how it helps teachers, leaders, schools and colleges to adjust or modify their practices in order to afford more learning are important. The medical trials currently ongoing in educational research in England as I write (and which I will reference below) will I am sure add to our understanding about how LS works. But for the reasons given by Professor Desforges in the preceding pages and for reasons that will unfold in this chapter and those that follow, I believe that LS is not only the CPD strategy of choice for schools, but that it also lends itself to use across schools and beyond schools as they collaborate and learn together with their university, college and other partners. LS is clearly emerging as professional learning for our time.

The purpose of this book is to give you a taste of how LS works in some schools and school systems and some knowledge of how to get going with and to lead LS. It also provides some evidence of how and why LS works and how it can help you to enhance learning, enhance schools, enhance initial and continuing teacher education, and to enhance curriculum, assessment, leadership and the system as a whole. The book provides insights from the UK, Japan and China, as well as a global perspective.

Amongst the book’s intended audience, then, are leaders of schools and local school systems and alliances, those in leadership positions in higher or continuing education as well as all those who work with and lead teacher development.

The book will give you more than enough knowledge to lead LS developments from any of these contexts. Now, I could save you a read by confessing that in my experience the best way to learn about LS is to get stuck in and do it – but if you read this book first you will do so more successfully.

In this first chapter I will provide a background to LS, what it is, how it works to promote deep teacher learning that change practice and improves learning for pupils and in particular how it is developing in the UK. I will then briefly introduce the chapters that follow.

1 What is Lesson Study and why does it work?

I was recently reviewing a video of a group of three teachers who were working together in a LS group. They were discussing a ‘research lesson’ (see page 8) that one of them had just taught and which had been observed by the other two members of the LS group. They discussed the way that the pupils had learned and compared this with how they had predicted that the pupils would learn when they had been planning the research lesson together. They explored the reasons why particular pupils had found aspects of the lesson difficult or easy and as they did so – raising hypotheses, testing out ideas, modifying, challenging and qualifying their ideas and suggestions – they gradually formed some tentative theories about how they could help the children to learn more successfully another time. They seamlessly moved into planning the next research lesson in which they were going to apply some of the things that they had learned from this group analysis of the lesson they had just conducted and to test out some of their theories.

They were deeply, deeply engrossed; absorbed in collectively solving the riddles of how to help these real pupils in a real class to learn about multiplying and dividing fractions more effectively and with greater understanding of what they were doing and why.

It was clear to me that all three teachers cared deeply about helping these children – even though only one of them regularly taught this class. It was clear that during the research lesson these teachers had found things out about the ways some of the pupils were learning that they had not known before. And it was clear that they were drawing on all the knowledge and experience that they collectively possessed about mathematics, about teaching mathematics, about how twelve year olds learn mathematics (or don’t learn) and that they were also drawing more broadly on their experience and knowledge about what motivates children of this age to learn, about pedagogy, about teaching and, above all, about learning.

As I watched, I too became rapidly engrossed in their discussion – puzzling along with these three teachers about how to help a group of pupils not become confused about the difference between multiplying and dividing fractions. I wondered and hypothesised with them as they pieced together their conclusions from the research lesson and started to use them to plan their next research lesson. And I was as excited as they were about what would happen in that lesson: to what extent the ideas that they were tweaking and honing and then retrying in that next research lesson would bear fruit in helping these children to learn more effectively.

It was only as they were packing up and talking about what was scheduled for the following day that I realised how much time had passed. They had started discussing the lesson in daylight and now the windows were black and the room was illuminated only by the classroom lights. I dragged the cursor back to the beginning of the video and fast-forwarded through it again. I watched them speedily, jerkily, earnestly talking, laughing, crowding round the planner, frowning, nodding, writing – all in fast motion. And sure enough, this time I noticed the light outside the windows fading. I saw the classroom lights take over. But then I saw a cleaner enter the classroom with a trolley of equipment and move from table to table squirting cleaner onto the surfaces and wiping them down – working awkwardly around the LS group who carried on with their discussions heedless of her presence. And I realised that whilst I had watched the video the first time at normal speed, that cleaner had been as oblivious to me as she had been to the group she sprayed and wiped around, because I too had been so completely focused on their discussions.

Then – still in fast motion and still with the LS teachers frenetically discussing, gesticulating, absorbed and unaware of the cleaner’s arrival and departure – I saw through the classroom window a light go on in the adjacent classroom as the cleaner worked her way methodically around that room, and then a further two classrooms in the block before returning for her trolley and leaving.

The LS group had been in intensive, sustained, unbroken group discussion about their pupils and about these two (one past and one future) research lessons, for over an hour.

Over the past 25 years I have used many models of teacher learning with countless groups of teachers and in many different contexts. But I know of only one approach that has never failed to elicit the depth of learning, the detailed accountability of teachers to how real children are learning in real classrooms and, as a result, that has never failed to elicit profound changes in subsequent practice.

LS as an approach to teacher learning

So while Charles Desforges, in the Foreword to this book, is of course correct when he says that for pupils the classroom is far from the ideal learning environment, I now argue, paradoxically perhaps, that for teachers, the classroom can be an ideal learning environment. But this is only when the classroom is occupied by a LS group of teachers planning their research lesson; or when it is filled with adults and children, as teachers teach and observe pupils learning during that research lesson; or again when it has emptied once more after the research lesson save for the LS group, intense in their discussion (and of course the occasional cleaner). In this discussion, the group members reflect upon the research lesson that has just taken place, sharing and analysing their observation notes and data, raising their hypotheses about how the children had learned or why some of them failed to learn as predicted, and speculating about what could have been done differently. They then begin to piece together the elements of their next research lesson, painstakingly applying to it their findings from this last one as they do so.

LS is the world’s fastest growing approach to teacher learning, and to developing teaching that in turn improves pupil learning. It has transformed the practice of tens of thousands of teachers and educational professionals worldwide – myself included!

LS has its roots in Japan, where it has been practiced by Japanese teachers for 140 years or more. And since the beginning of the twenty-first century LS has become a global phenomenon. LS allows teachers to transform the way they teach the children they are teaching now in the lessons they are teaching now. It takes place in their classrooms. It enables them to problem solve and to share their practices, to understand each others’ pupils’ learning and each others’ teaching; and through this to learn from and with each other.

LS provides a context where teachers can take risks with their practice and feel safe to share their reciprocal, professional vulnerabilities. It gets to the parts that other professional development doesn’t reach!

LS works because it allows teachers to see, share, tap into and learn from usually invisible stores of tacit professional knowledge that are normally inaccessible as a learning resource. It allows the inexperienced to learn from the experienced, the generalist to learn from the expert – but also the reverse of these.

LS requires no special equipment or resources. It requires minimal training – the best way to get good at it is to do it. And LS is currently not only improving learning and teaching, it is improving schools and raising standards.

What is LS?

LS is a deceptively simple sequence of collaborative reflective practice (Pollard et al., 2014): joint professional development or ‘JPD’ as David Hargreaves (2012) terms it. The beauty of its simplicity is that any small group of teachers can do it. Because it requires no technology or prior experience, it is now in use in many developing countries worldwide. But the list of countries now using LS now includes all the top performing nations as well. The danger in the simplicity of LS, however, is that it is easily adapted and corrupted by a teaching profession that too often has been encouraged simply to innovate for innovation’s sake, to play fast and loose with an ‘adapt adopt’ approach to practice transfer and which even in the twenty-first century, is still unused to adopting professional levels of clinical discipline when applying and honing classroom interventions or innovations.

The LS cycle

I will set out the sequence of a lesson study here. This and later chapters will help you to build a broader understanding of what makes a lesson study a ‘lesson study’; what liberties can be taken with its design without harming its power, and what seemingly harmless adaptations can render the resulting process one so weakened that it should not be termed LS.

In LS a group of teachers work together to improve the learning of their pupils and to develop ways of teaching them that help them to overcome barriers or difficulties they are encountering in learning, often in learning some very specific aspects of the curriculum.

In the model of LS that I have developed over the last 14 years in the UK and which features significantly in this book, teachers involved have a clear focus for this improvement in their pupils’ learning. I will give two different examples. The improvement could be:

1. to help some pupils who are not making the progress their teachers feel they could be making. The focus here being on particular pupils’ levels of engagement or motivation or other factors affecting the way that they engage with learning.

Or it could be:

2. to introduce a curriculum unit on ratio to a particular class with more success than in the past – because teachers have noticed that many pupils do not make as much progress in this unit as they do in most other mathematics units. The focus here is on curriculum and pedagogy.

In order to create the conditions necessary for teachers to learn together, LS group teachers usually adopt a LS group protocol (see Panel 1 below) that ensures they can work together and quickly develop trust in each other, thus then fe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword: Lesson Study as a strategic choice for CPD
• Acknowledgements
• 1 How Lesson Study works and why it creates excellent learning and teaching
• 2 Lesson Study: an international review of the research
• 3 Leading Lesson Study in schools and across school systems
• 4 How Lesson Study helps teachers of pupils with specific needs or difficulties
• 5 Lesson Study in initial teacher education
• 6 Evolving the curriculum through Lesson Study in Japan
• 7 Prospects for further development of Lesson Study
• Index