UNDERSTANDING OTHERS, EDUCATING OURSELVES: Getting More from International Comparative Studies in Education by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 2003-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

BOX 3-3 Impact of Japanese Lesson Study in the United States

Lesson study, or jugyokenkyu, is a process of professional development that evolved during the period of progressive education reform in Japan following World War II, a time when the focus was on teacher-directed work on curriculum development and child-centered education (Yoshida, 1999). The process begins when a group of teachers, either from the same school or from different ones, comes together to work toward a common goal they want to achieve, usually to address a gap they have identified in students’ current knowledge or ability. Working on lesson study involves several steps that incorporate both observation and collaboration, and yield a written record of the insights gained from watching lessons unfold in a real classroom.

The goal of the lesson study process is to help teachers become more deliberate and self-aware in their teaching practice and to carry insights gained from group planning into their daily individual lesson planning and teaching practice. The process is designed to be teacher-driven; teachers select the topic to be studied, identify the goal of the lesson, and learn from each other’s experiences and expertise.

The history of lesson study in the United States began in the 1980s and 1990s, when the process came to the attention of several U.S. education scholars through their ongoing research into Japanese approaches to teaching. Catherine Lewis became aware of lesson study through her observations in Japanese elementary classrooms (see Box 2-3). James Stigler became aware of lesson study during his research on an NSF-funded study using videotapes of Japanese and U.S. teaching. In 1993-1994, Stigler and his graduate student Clea Fernandez directed a lesson study group in the United States with a group of teachers from the University of California Los Angeles Lab School. Makoto Yoshida, a doctoral student of Stigler’s collecting data on lesson study in Japan, served as their main source of information for guiding U.S. teachers through the process.

The TIMSS Videotape Classroom Study, with its images from Japanese classrooms, piqued broad interest in Japanese approaches to teaching mathematics. Stigler and James Hiebert published the findings from TIMSS for a broad audience in The Teaching Gap (1999) and, through this work, lesson study emerged both as an important tool for understanding the culture of teaching in Japan and a potentially beneficial strategy in the U.S. education context.

To deepen understanding about lesson study and to explore its impact in U.S. schools, in 1999 Fernandez, now a professor at Teachers’ College at Columbia University, and Yoshida began working with Paterson Public School #2 in New Jersey in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Eisenhower Consortium and the Japanese School of Greenwich, Connecticut. The first large-scale open house took place in 2000 with 150 attendees from the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.