Have you been looking for an educator professional development structure that builds teacher leadership and inquiry capacity, develops robust content and pedagogical knowledge, and centers on deeply understanding student thinking? If so, we invite you to explore Lesson Study – a collaborative inquiry structure that can transform professional learning communities (PLCs) or discipline meetings into purposeful and engaging learning opportunities.
After visiting a public research lesson study event at an elementary school in San Francisco last year, we were so moved by the experience, we decided we needed to bring lesson study to our schools immediately. Over the past year we have hosted three public research math lessons – 10th grade, 8th grade, and 3rd grade – and numerous shorter lesson study sessions in science, math, and literacy across our 16 K-12 schools. Through participating in collaborative lesson study teams, our teachers have deepened their content and pedagogical knowledge, increased their leadership capacity, created a shared vision for teaching and learning, and developed a school culture of improvement.
In true lesson study fashion, we would like to share our learning from the year through a series of weekly blog posts that will share the process and resources our teams used to engage in a research lesson inquiry cycle. We’ll include concrete examples, tips, and things we wish we knew when we started out. We invite you to join us!
Daisy Sharrock works at the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, where she directs the Mathematical Agency Improvement Community, a network of educators from 20 Southern California schools working to abolish the phase “I am not a math person,” and co-directs the Lesson Study Leadership Project. Daisy is also part of a Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative-sponsored research team that is currently engaged in the following study: Leveraging the Power of Improvement Networks to Spread Lesson Study. Read more about the study here.
This blog was created with support from JFF and KnowledgeWorks‘ the Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative and its funders for their support. Learn more at sclresearchcollab.org.”