Finally, somebody in America is taking up "lesson study," the method the Japanese used to reform their educational system after World War II, all but completely turning it inside out in the process.
And not only that - it's practically in my own home town. And not only that, it parallels the sort of teacher initiatives I've seen my entire career and wish that more people could see and acknowledge.
And what is "lesson study?" Follow below the orange doodle bug for more. I promise to be less than my normal wordy self this time.
What is "Lesson Study?"
Simply put, "Lesson Study" is exactly what it sounds like. You teach a lesson and study what happens. There's a critical difference, though, from what usually happens in America, where ivory tower types enter classrooms and subject them to their doctoral dissertation deconstructions, then publish them to academia where they get warehoused like the lost ark, never to see the light of public day again.
In "Lesson Study," the researchers are the teachers themselves.
Now, to read the article that got me so excited about this today, you simply need to click here. In this case, it's a group of teachers under the sponsorship of the Mills College Ed Department (in America, that higher-education tie-in is usually a necessity).
One might ask, "Isn't this idea of practitioners studying lessons pretty obvious? Doctors research medicine all the time. Just ask any of Kaiser's patients, who are subject to continual invitations to take part in this study or that. So why has it taken so long for teachers to think of doing the same?"
And the answer, of course, is that it really hasn't. The truth be told, probably just about every teacher does some form of informal research on his/her students all the time. However, teachers in America seldom get the sort of support in time and opportunity that would encourage them to formalize the process and enter into extensive long-term collaborations and have access to systems to easily distribute their findings. Many do this anyway, but in my experience, many more are simply too overworked already to add the additional burden of such formalized research.
How it works in Japan
In Japan, though, a teacher's day is structured quite differently than in America (according to what I've read). Although they might work as long hours as American teachers, a decisively smaller fraction of that time is spent in the classroom. This leaves lots of time for preparation and, most importantly, collaboration.
In Japan, lesson study is employed by groups of teachers (usually a department), not a single teacher, which places the emphasis on the process and the student response, and not on the performance or personality of any individual teacher. Lessons are taught, revised, retaught to another class, revised further, etc. Revisions are made in light of observations in the classroom, as well as pre and post testing, and really, everything you might expect to be grounds for a revision.
The group of teachers involved in the research benefits directly from the knowledge gained, but there is also a system in place to distribute model lessons throughout the school community, both locally and nationally. It's all freely available to any teacher - no purchase from publishers required.
This is a system that produces long-lasting and effective results, but it can (and did) take decades to do so. One must be willing to be a tortoise and not a hare.
My 2¢ okay .. 3¢
Firstly, this sort of research puts teachers in control of their own profession. This sort of buy-in is incredibly motivating, no matter what sort of profession we're talking about. The motivational draw also sucks in "those" teachers who don't always seem as focused as one would like.
But there is no getting around the fact that this process requires that teachers be trusted. And in fact, probably one of the main reasons it hasn't been tried more in the United States is the (definitely bipartisan) mistrust of teachers in our culture. In Japan, teachers are respected.
Secondly,the educational solutions that are found are already adapted to local conditions, because the researchers themselves are part of the local community. When the Japanese started the process sixty years ago, they didn't know where it would lead. They only knew that they wanted success, and were willing to adapt to achieve it. What they got was a teaching methodology naturally adapted to their culture, not because the system is Japanese, but because it's a system that promotes methodologies adapted to whatever local conditions are present.
That said, I heartily recommend that people view the videos made for the TIMSS (third International Math and Science Study) about a decade or so ago. You can see typical middle school math lessons from America, Germany, and Japan. If you're like me, you'll fast forward through the American and German sections. It's all just too familiar and predictable, even if you don't know the material already. But when you get to the Japanese section, you'll get sucked in just like the math students in the video.
All that is to say, good teaching can transcend culture.
Thirdly, I am wildly in favor of implementing lesson study throughout the USA (but don't hold a lot of optimism for it happening on a widespread basis because it's expensive(due to the paid out-of-class time),requires that teachers be trusted, and takes a significant time to produce its long-lasting results.).
However, in my most wildly optimistic states of mind, I imagine lesson study as a transition step to teachers studying the learning processes of the students themselves, that is, taking the focus beyond the curriculum and putting it where it really belongs, on the learner him/herself. I believe this because of my own graduate-level research into Piagetian theory, which was entirely conducted (or inflicted) on my own students. I never learned so much before.
However, if we never got beyond lesson study, I'd still be happy.
Fourthly, I glibly tossed off the comment that some teachers do research in formal or semi-formal settings anyway. In fact, this is really true. In fact, it would not surprise me to find out that lesson study has been tried before in America, perhaps many times. However, the system to support a long term commitment probably was not there, and definitely the system to easily and cheaply and widely distribute the results was not there.
But teachers do this sort of thing all the time. The California Science Implementation Network (now defunct) and the National Writing Project (now under funding threat) are but two examples of such teacher communities that I have taken part in.
As a further example, I recently reviewed a book entitled Fluency Through TPR Storytelling: Achieving Real Language Acquisition in School by Blaine Ray and Contee Seely. It's fair to say that this book represents a huge community of second-language teachers doing their own informal research, sharing and arguing ideas through community, and gradually changing their practice as a result of the process. This movement is known as TPRS (click for more information) I find it incredibly encouraging that this group of teachers is advancing and adapting their method with no visible means of university support whatsoever.
And even one of my very own former students, now a high school teacher, has started a blog and has started producing educational materials to attract a community of teachers to deal with high school education in economically disadvantaged areas.
All this is to say, that, if teachers were ever really allowed to take charge of their profession, and if such research, extensive collaboration, and the concomitant implementation were actually encouraged by the system, the American schools would explode in a creativity and effectiveness that would be the envy of the world.