Discover how to implement lesson study in schools to elevate teacher professional development. Learn step-by-step methods for effective collaborative action research.
Benjamin, Z (2023, October 30). Lesson Study. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/lesson-study
Lesson Study is a transformative approach to professional development that's steeped in collaborative action research.
Originating from Japanese educational practices, Lesson Study is a cyclical process where teachers collectively plan lessons, observe each other's teaching, and then reconvene to refine their strategies.
It's not just a one-off meeting; it's an ongoing cycle of inquiry aimed at continually enhancing curriculum resources and teaching methodologies to elevate student learning outcomes.
According to Stigler and Hiebert, Lesson Study is "a process that produces more than just a good lesson plan; it produces a professional learning community."
Imagine a science class where a teacher struggles to explain the concept of osmosis. Through Lesson Study, a team of teachers collaboratively designs an innovative lesson, observes its delivery, and then regroups to fine-tune the approach. The result? A more effective lesson and a teacher armed with new insights.
As we delve deeper into this article, we'll unpack the multifaceted layers of Lesson Study, exploring its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. Intriguingly, a study found that schools implementing Lesson Study saw a 25% increase in student engagement levels.
As education researcher John Hattie aptly puts it, "Teachers need to be learners too, and Lesson Study provides the platform for this dual role."
Key Insights:
The lesson study cycle is a form of collaborative action research, characterized by a cycle of planning, observation, reflection and refinement.
Each inquiry cycle begins by identifying the goals for student learning. Between three and five teachers work together to create lesson plans, determine the instructional strategies they will use, and create any additional resources they will need.
One teacher delivers a lesson to students while being observed by their colleagues from the lesson study team.
Following the lesson, the classroom teachers meet together to review the lesson's impact on student learning (reflection) and determine how they can refine their strategies to improve learning in the next study lesson. This forms the beginning of the second inquiry cycle.
The next study lesson can be delivered by the same teacher with the same class or by one of their colleagues with one of their classes. The most suitable approach will be determined by the lesson study team, and the lesson study cycles will be repeated with the goal of achieving continuous improvement.
Once enough cycles have been completed for the lesson study team to be confident that they have achieved the best outcomes for their pupils, the team will share their findings with their wider education community.
The goal is to achieve greater collective teacher efficacy throughout the profession, not just those who participated directly in the study.
Stigler and Hiebert (1999) identified six pedagogical principles that explain why the lesson study method has a significant impact on student learning.
1. Improvement is Continual and Gradual
The lesson study process is designed to produce professional growth and continuous improvement over a series of action research cycles. The process may take a few months or a whole academic year. Once it is complete, the lesson study team may choose to work with a new group of classroom teachers to improve a different aspect of their practice.
2. Student Learning is the Success Criteria
Improving student learning is the goal of each action research cycle. The teachers observing the study lesson will compare the student learning goals to the student outcomes to inform their reflection meeting. The subsequent discussions will focus on how the instructional design or curriculum resources impacted students' learning.
3. Emphasis is Placed on Teaching, Not Teachers
Unlike formal lesson observations that are used to form part of an appraisal system, lesson studies do not make judgements or assessments about teachers. Instead, the emphasis is placed on teaching and how this impacts student learning. A lesson study is a collaborative process designed to improve teaching and learning amongst its participators and the wider school community.
4. Decisions and Actions are Context Specific
Lesson studies are small-scale pieces of research that are carried out at a classroom level. They often focus on engaging disaffected students or groups of students within a class, which means the teachers' decisions and actions will be governed by the students in the room.
The goal of a lesson study cycle will very specific to the classroom context and individual students within the class.
5. Teachers are Empowered
An important feature of lesson study is that teachers are viewed as creators of the curriculum and not passive implementers of it. They are empowered to make pedagogical decisions and change the curriculum design to best meet the needs of their pupils.
The team of teachers will often have similar levels of experience and expertise, so that decisions can be made jointly and the process encourages collective teacher efficacy.
6. Continuous Improvement is Part of the Process
The lesson study process is designed to encourage inquiry-based teaching through a series of continuous learning cycles. By participating in the process, teachers produce lasting knowledge and the skills to use action research to explore new ways to improve their students' learning.
An important feature of lesson study is that the outcomes should be shared with the wider education world by publishing findings or sharing best practice with colleagues.
The beauty of lesson study is that it has a student-centered focus throughout each phase. It begins with identifying the desired student learning goals, then determining the most appropriate teaching strategies, and finally observing the impact that these have on students.
During the observation phase of each cycle, teachers will be gathering evidence of student learning to inform future planning. This will include a careful study of student responses, student engagement, and the quality of work produced by the end of the lesson.
The reflection phase will be an evaluation of teaching and learning.
Lesson studies can become more student-centered by gathering feedback from students through focus groups, student surveys and interviews. They can also become active participators in the planning stage of the inquiry cycles or collaborating with their teachers to observe lessons.
Peer observation is an integral part of the lesson study process. Teacher teams work together in the lesson design stage and will often take turns to deliver the new material, while the rest of the team observe the impact it has on student learning.
Peer observation by their fellow teachers is essential in gathering feedback about the effectiveness of the new teaching strategy or resources that the team have created.
These observations are used to inform the reflection stage of the action research cycle, where decisions are made about the best course of action to continue moving learning forward.
Collaboration between teachers, including peer observation, can have a great impact on teachers' motivation to improve their own practice and engage with professional development activities.
Classroom teaching can often feel very solitary, and lesson study offers teachers the opportunity to work together, observe each other teaching, and connect with their colleagues in a way that they may not have done otherwise.
The benefits of lesson study for students can be seen after just one single lesson. The student-centered focus means that the new curriculum materials and collaborative teaching approach improves students' outcomes very quickly.
The purpose of a lesson study cycle is to improve learning and utilizing the collective knowledge of three to five teachers is a very efficient way for small changes to classroom practice to have a great impact on the effectiveness of teaching.
Lesson study also benefits teachers by providing them with meaningful professional learning with a relatively low time commitment. One of the greatest criticisms of teachers' professional development initiatives is that they are too generic to be effective.
Lesson study does not suffer from this criticism as it is context specific; colleagues from the same school work together to overcome a specific challenge that they have identified or to engage specific group of students.
The collective learning that is generated by the team of teachers may not generalize well to other settings, but it will have a great impact on their practice with their specific group of students.
When colleagues collaborate with each other, they experience greater self-efficacy, create new education ideas and challenge existing beliefs around teaching.
They also learn how to conduct research, reflect on their own practice, and have pedagogical discussions with their colleagues even after the lesson study cycles have ended.
Although school based lesson study is an effective form of professional development that directly benefits students, there are some challenges for lesson study that need to be considered by school leaders before deciding when and how to implement it. Common challenges include:
1. Heavy Teacher Workload
The teaching profession is known for having a high workload, encompassing planning, marking, report writing, co-curricular activities, and offering pastoral support to students.
Lesson study will inevitably add to a teacher's workload, and will do so for a minimum of three teachers at a time. Particularly during the busiest periods of a school year, teachers may not feel that they have the capacity to add this to their workload.
2. Time Constraints
To total amount of time needed to conduct a single cycle of a a lesson study will be approximately three hours: one hour for planning, one hour for delivery, and one hour for reflection.
However, each lesson study involves three to five members of staff, and they are likely to complete at least three cycles before they are satisfied with the outcome they have achieved.
Each participating teacher can expect to spend at least 9 hours taking part in a lesson study; for many teachers, this time commitment may be considered too great.
3. Financial Implications
Once a team of teachers has been established to complete a lesson study, they will need time together for planning, observing, and reflecting.
This will normally require one or more of the teachers to have a lesson covered in order for the whole team to be free at the same time.
In most education establishments, there will be a cost associated with providing a supply or cover lesson. The amount of cover required for a full lesson study could be up to 36 hours across an academic year for a single team of five teachers.
4. Leadership Support
If the lesson study process is not supported by a school's leadership team, it will not be possible for teachers to successfully conduct the action research cycles. Leaders will need to provide:
Adapting an existing professional development programme to incorporate lesson study can challenge some of the obstacles identified above.
Review The Existing Programme
Removing less meaningful professional development activities and replacing them with lesson study will prevent increasing teachers' overall workload.
Restructure Professional Development Time
Instead of running professional development days at the start of term, replace one eight-hour day with eight after-school sessions spread out throughout the year.
Each one-hour session could be used for teaching teams to meet together for planning or reflection. This approach reduces the time commitment associated with lesson study and also ensures that meetings can be held when all teachers are free, which reduces the need for lessons to be covered during the day.
Collaborative Enquiry Training
Provide teachers with collaborative enquiry training before introducing lesson study to a professional development programme to teachers the confidence and skills to actively engage with it.
The training should include how to conduct each stage of the research cycle, data collection techniques, and how to disseminate the group's findings.
Identify Whole-School Priorities
Identify whole-school priorities that can be addressed through lesson study, and ask teachers to sign up for the area they are most interested in.
This approach will allow teacher teams to be formed based on a common interest and whole-school areas of development to be addressed.
Stigler, J & Hiebert, J (1999) The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom, New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster (Updated 2009).
Gutierez, S. B. (2016). Building a classroom-based professional learning community through lesson study: insights from elementary school science teachers. Professional Development in Education.
Özdemir, S. (2019). Implementation of the Lesson Study as a Tool to Improve Students' Learning and Professional Development of Teachers. Participatory Education Research.
Coenders, F., & Verhoef, N. (2019). Lesson Study: professional development (PD) for beginning and experienced teachers. Professional Development in Education.
Lee, L. H. J., & Tan, S. (2020). Teacher learning in Lesson Study: Affordances, disturbances, contradictions, and implications. Teaching and Teacher Education.
Widjaja, W., Vale, C., Groves, S., & Doig, B. (2017). Teachers’ professional growth through engagement with lesson study. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education.
Lesson Study is a transformative approach to professional development that's steeped in collaborative action research.
Originating from Japanese educational practices, Lesson Study is a cyclical process where teachers collectively plan lessons, observe each other's teaching, and then reconvene to refine their strategies.
It's not just a one-off meeting; it's an ongoing cycle of inquiry aimed at continually enhancing curriculum resources and teaching methodologies to elevate student learning outcomes.
According to Stigler and Hiebert, Lesson Study is "a process that produces more than just a good lesson plan; it produces a professional learning community."
Imagine a science class where a teacher struggles to explain the concept of osmosis. Through Lesson Study, a team of teachers collaboratively designs an innovative lesson, observes its delivery, and then regroups to fine-tune the approach. The result? A more effective lesson and a teacher armed with new insights.
As we delve deeper into this article, we'll unpack the multifaceted layers of Lesson Study, exploring its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. Intriguingly, a study found that schools implementing Lesson Study saw a 25% increase in student engagement levels.
As education researcher John Hattie aptly puts it, "Teachers need to be learners too, and Lesson Study provides the platform for this dual role."
Key Insights:
The lesson study cycle is a form of collaborative action research, characterized by a cycle of planning, observation, reflection and refinement.
Each inquiry cycle begins by identifying the goals for student learning. Between three and five teachers work together to create lesson plans, determine the instructional strategies they will use, and create any additional resources they will need.
One teacher delivers a lesson to students while being observed by their colleagues from the lesson study team.
Following the lesson, the classroom teachers meet together to review the lesson's impact on student learning (reflection) and determine how they can refine their strategies to improve learning in the next study lesson. This forms the beginning of the second inquiry cycle.
The next study lesson can be delivered by the same teacher with the same class or by one of their colleagues with one of their classes. The most suitable approach will be determined by the lesson study team, and the lesson study cycles will be repeated with the goal of achieving continuous improvement.
Once enough cycles have been completed for the lesson study team to be confident that they have achieved the best outcomes for their pupils, the team will share their findings with their wider education community.
The goal is to achieve greater collective teacher efficacy throughout the profession, not just those who participated directly in the study.
Stigler and Hiebert (1999) identified six pedagogical principles that explain why the lesson study method has a significant impact on student learning.
1. Improvement is Continual and Gradual
The lesson study process is designed to produce professional growth and continuous improvement over a series of action research cycles. The process may take a few months or a whole academic year. Once it is complete, the lesson study team may choose to work with a new group of classroom teachers to improve a different aspect of their practice.
2. Student Learning is the Success Criteria
Improving student learning is the goal of each action research cycle. The teachers observing the study lesson will compare the student learning goals to the student outcomes to inform their reflection meeting. The subsequent discussions will focus on how the instructional design or curriculum resources impacted students' learning.
3. Emphasis is Placed on Teaching, Not Teachers
Unlike formal lesson observations that are used to form part of an appraisal system, lesson studies do not make judgements or assessments about teachers. Instead, the emphasis is placed on teaching and how this impacts student learning. A lesson study is a collaborative process designed to improve teaching and learning amongst its participators and the wider school community.
4. Decisions and Actions are Context Specific
Lesson studies are small-scale pieces of research that are carried out at a classroom level. They often focus on engaging disaffected students or groups of students within a class, which means the teachers' decisions and actions will be governed by the students in the room.
The goal of a lesson study cycle will very specific to the classroom context and individual students within the class.
5. Teachers are Empowered
An important feature of lesson study is that teachers are viewed as creators of the curriculum and not passive implementers of it. They are empowered to make pedagogical decisions and change the curriculum design to best meet the needs of their pupils.
The team of teachers will often have similar levels of experience and expertise, so that decisions can be made jointly and the process encourages collective teacher efficacy.
6. Continuous Improvement is Part of the Process
The lesson study process is designed to encourage inquiry-based teaching through a series of continuous learning cycles. By participating in the process, teachers produce lasting knowledge and the skills to use action research to explore new ways to improve their students' learning.
An important feature of lesson study is that the outcomes should be shared with the wider education world by publishing findings or sharing best practice with colleagues.
The beauty of lesson study is that it has a student-centered focus throughout each phase. It begins with identifying the desired student learning goals, then determining the most appropriate teaching strategies, and finally observing the impact that these have on students.
During the observation phase of each cycle, teachers will be gathering evidence of student learning to inform future planning. This will include a careful study of student responses, student engagement, and the quality of work produced by the end of the lesson.
The reflection phase will be an evaluation of teaching and learning.
Lesson studies can become more student-centered by gathering feedback from students through focus groups, student surveys and interviews. They can also become active participators in the planning stage of the inquiry cycles or collaborating with their teachers to observe lessons.
Peer observation is an integral part of the lesson study process. Teacher teams work together in the lesson design stage and will often take turns to deliver the new material, while the rest of the team observe the impact it has on student learning.
Peer observation by their fellow teachers is essential in gathering feedback about the effectiveness of the new teaching strategy or resources that the team have created.
These observations are used to inform the reflection stage of the action research cycle, where decisions are made about the best course of action to continue moving learning forward.
Collaboration between teachers, including peer observation, can have a great impact on teachers' motivation to improve their own practice and engage with professional development activities.
Classroom teaching can often feel very solitary, and lesson study offers teachers the opportunity to work together, observe each other teaching, and connect with their colleagues in a way that they may not have done otherwise.
The benefits of lesson study for students can be seen after just one single lesson. The student-centered focus means that the new curriculum materials and collaborative teaching approach improves students' outcomes very quickly.
The purpose of a lesson study cycle is to improve learning and utilizing the collective knowledge of three to five teachers is a very efficient way for small changes to classroom practice to have a great impact on the effectiveness of teaching.
Lesson study also benefits teachers by providing them with meaningful professional learning with a relatively low time commitment. One of the greatest criticisms of teachers' professional development initiatives is that they are too generic to be effective.
Lesson study does not suffer from this criticism as it is context specific; colleagues from the same school work together to overcome a specific challenge that they have identified or to engage specific group of students.
The collective learning that is generated by the team of teachers may not generalize well to other settings, but it will have a great impact on their practice with their specific group of students.
When colleagues collaborate with each other, they experience greater self-efficacy, create new education ideas and challenge existing beliefs around teaching.
They also learn how to conduct research, reflect on their own practice, and have pedagogical discussions with their colleagues even after the lesson study cycles have ended.
Although school based lesson study is an effective form of professional development that directly benefits students, there are some challenges for lesson study that need to be considered by school leaders before deciding when and how to implement it. Common challenges include:
1. Heavy Teacher Workload
The teaching profession is known for having a high workload, encompassing planning, marking, report writing, co-curricular activities, and offering pastoral support to students.
Lesson study will inevitably add to a teacher's workload, and will do so for a minimum of three teachers at a time. Particularly during the busiest periods of a school year, teachers may not feel that they have the capacity to add this to their workload.
2. Time Constraints
To total amount of time needed to conduct a single cycle of a a lesson study will be approximately three hours: one hour for planning, one hour for delivery, and one hour for reflection.
However, each lesson study involves three to five members of staff, and they are likely to complete at least three cycles before they are satisfied with the outcome they have achieved.
Each participating teacher can expect to spend at least 9 hours taking part in a lesson study; for many teachers, this time commitment may be considered too great.
3. Financial Implications
Once a team of teachers has been established to complete a lesson study, they will need time together for planning, observing, and reflecting.
This will normally require one or more of the teachers to have a lesson covered in order for the whole team to be free at the same time.
In most education establishments, there will be a cost associated with providing a supply or cover lesson. The amount of cover required for a full lesson study could be up to 36 hours across an academic year for a single team of five teachers.
4. Leadership Support
If the lesson study process is not supported by a school's leadership team, it will not be possible for teachers to successfully conduct the action research cycles. Leaders will need to provide:
Adapting an existing professional development programme to incorporate lesson study can challenge some of the obstacles identified above.
Review The Existing Programme
Removing less meaningful professional development activities and replacing them with lesson study will prevent increasing teachers' overall workload.
Restructure Professional Development Time
Instead of running professional development days at the start of term, replace one eight-hour day with eight after-school sessions spread out throughout the year.
Each one-hour session could be used for teaching teams to meet together for planning or reflection. This approach reduces the time commitment associated with lesson study and also ensures that meetings can be held when all teachers are free, which reduces the need for lessons to be covered during the day.
Collaborative Enquiry Training
Provide teachers with collaborative enquiry training before introducing lesson study to a professional development programme to teachers the confidence and skills to actively engage with it.
The training should include how to conduct each stage of the research cycle, data collection techniques, and how to disseminate the group's findings.
Identify Whole-School Priorities
Identify whole-school priorities that can be addressed through lesson study, and ask teachers to sign up for the area they are most interested in.
This approach will allow teacher teams to be formed based on a common interest and whole-school areas of development to be addressed.
Stigler, J & Hiebert, J (1999) The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World’s Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom, New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster (Updated 2009).
Gutierez, S. B. (2016). Building a classroom-based professional learning community through lesson study: insights from elementary school science teachers. Professional Development in Education.
Özdemir, S. (2019). Implementation of the Lesson Study as a Tool to Improve Students' Learning and Professional Development of Teachers. Participatory Education Research.
Coenders, F., & Verhoef, N. (2019). Lesson Study: professional development (PD) for beginning and experienced teachers. Professional Development in Education.
Lee, L. H. J., & Tan, S. (2020). Teacher learning in Lesson Study: Affordances, disturbances, contradictions, and implications. Teaching and Teacher Education.
Widjaja, W., Vale, C., Groves, S., & Doig, B. (2017). Teachers’ professional growth through engagement with lesson study. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education.
