LESSON STUDY: PEER COLLABORATION
Within the context of a lesson, the professional development method of ‘Lesson Study’enables teachers to collaboratively experiment, analyze and revise the teaching and learning process. It consists of a systematic and iterative cycle of stages with a small group of teachers collaboratively designing, implementing and analyzing a lesson. Within the designing stage, the group collaboratively determines the academic and long-term learning goals of the lesson and examines relevant resources and the topic and tasks to be posed.
Once the lesson is drafted, the group identifies ways of improving the lesson by considering how students learn, how to capitalize on student responses, what questions will provoke thinking, how to make thinking visible to observation and how to further the lesson’s goals. The final stage of design involves determining the lessons procedure and rationale, including blackboard and teaching material use, learning activities, time allotment, teaching and assessment questions, and developing a system for student learning assessment .
The lesson is taught by one member of the group and observed by the collaborating teachers and knowledgeable others who all take detailed notes of the participant’s visible displays of teaching and learning. After the lesson, the group and others meet to reflect on the learning experience and analyze their notes and data collected for evidence of how students learned from the lesson, what they were thinking, where they were having problems and how their thinking changed, revealing connections between student learning and teaching practices.
The second iteration involves returning to the design stage and redesigning the lesson with the new knowledge acquired and repeating the entire process until the lesson meets the set or newly modified learning goals. This lesson study process enables teachers to experiment with different approaches and philosophies and make best practice improvements founded on evidence of constructive student learning. Finally, the group documents the lesson study, similar to a scientific experiment, with hypothesis or goals, materials, procedure, rationale, observations, data analysis, and conclusion to be make public for others to repeat or further revise the lesson.
Is everything we do focused on the effectiveness of the individual? ‘Is this teacher effective?’Not, ‘Are the methods they’re using effective, and could they use other methods? These are the questions that a lesson could answer. Our job as a teacher does not end to teaching the lessons alone. It is our duty to check and counter check whether our strategies are still significant to teaching and learning process. This is the main goal of Lesson Study.