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Saturday
Morning Presentation from Mitch Gordon from Lesson Lab, the Lesson Design project
co-directed by James Stigler and Ron Galimore in Los Angeles. (Report
based on notes from Pat Egenberger, Marcia Russell, and Miles Myers).
“The parents sent us the best children
they have. They don't keep the best ones at home." Lesson
Lab: slows down teaching so it can be analyzed. No knowledge base for
teaching. Lesson Lab is building one. Lesson Lab has 3 Parts: Viewer,
Builder, and Portal Interface Lesson
Lab Viewer is a platform for analyzing Lessons.
Lesson Lab Builder is software for authoring or developing one’s
own platform (using the kinds of analysis one desires), and Portal Interface
gives one access to Best practice lessons with curriculum.
Ex: Pepperdine uses as case study for preservice teachers. Ex:
LA Unified Mentor Program: mentor teachers are trained and give mentees
one case study per month to train 6,000 teachers. Lesson
Lab uses whole videos of classrooms and breaks the Lesson into sections
with hotlinks. One hotlink is the text of the Lesson. You can
transcribe the video in any language, and one can print and search the
transcript. Other hotlinks from the video to a resource include Student
work, Standards, Textbook pages, other videos and graphics, and pieces
can be time coded back to the Lesson. Thus one can stop the Lesson at some provide
and insert various kinds of analysis at that point. Another option is
a hotlink to commentary from experts and commentary by students. Another
hotlink Lesson Lab is to the Workbook, 3 parts: Notebook, Forums
(Discussion Board, moderated), and Tasks (Can give assignments based
on lesson and Facilitates collaboration after watching video).
Can tell group to mark video every time they see a specific thing
like student misconception. Then immediately graph where everyone
in the group said it would be. Software is most useful when it is used as
a hybrid of online learning and face-to-face learning. Lesson
Lab gives teachers the opportunity to observe other teachers. Teachers
are very isolated.
Make it public, something you can all look at together, making
judgments about the quality of their work reflecting in groups refining
and trying again. Teachers need to see a lot of lessons slowed
down so they can observe teachers working with their peers observe what
students are actually learning knowledge base lack of time lack of knowledge
base for teaching. Teachers can visit on the Internet through
the on-line platform with others. Get professional development
when it's convenient. In summary, then, LessonLab gives us (1) software for studying an analysis of video tapes of classroom lessons (and authoring our own analysis), using the video tapes we provide or borrow from other (what Mitch Gordon called guerilla video taping), (2) a pool of video tapes and platforms for Lesson analysis, and (3) on-line setups so that teachers can collaborate in a study of Lessons even when not face-to-face. The LessonLab programs are most effective when combined with face-to-face interactions in a community of professionals. The accumulated analysis becomes the Knowledge-Base of Lesson Design, the software makes teaching visible (video, slowed down, hotlinks from image in video to student work, whatever), and the on-line and face-to-face arrangements provide the collaboration in professional communities. This approach can be adapted to a wide range of circumstances. The lesson is indexed so you can go where you want to go, an index of different lesson designs given your need. These are my kids, their level of background knowledge--can I find a custom lesson frame? Is it catalogued related to the standards? You can make your professional development standards based. You can take digital pictures of student work, and you can hotlink to interviews with teachers about the lesson, letting you hear teacher’s reflections on a particular place in the lesson. There
is a Pyramid structure in LA for primary math teaching --They do one
case study a month. Teachers
are videotaped once a month and share their work and observations. This
keeps teaching from being private. They are affiliated with National
Board for Professional Teaching Standards. People in your group can
compare their commentary, which is attached to different sections of
the video clip math in K-2. NOTE:
The Lesson Lab presentation showed us how LESSONLAB software
could be used to analyze the features of Lesson Design.
It did not show us how technology might play a role as a feature
in Lesson Design. In one example of the use of technology, Brad
Shurmantine reported that his school was trying out E-Rater as an assessment
device in Lesson Design. At
an earlier conference, Brad described how E-rater could be used as a
third party in the teacher-student conference on a student’s essay,
adding to the conference the views of a larger community of raters. The
Lesson Lab approach in its software grows out of the coding experiences
in the TMS study. At the suggestion of one participate, the following
description of TMS coding of Lessons has been added (from the internet): --------------------------------------------------------- The analysis of teaching from video
taped lessons is difficult, and compounded if cross-cultural comparisons
are conducted. A reliable coding system must be deployed so both common
and unique cultural features of teaching are adequately captured. In the first TIMSS Video Study the
coding strategy involved a long and difficult building of a "bottom-up"
coding system that could be applied to lesson tapes from the three countries
in the study: Germany, Japan, and the United States. A team of code
developers, with representatives from each country, wrote definitions
for codes that communicated what "counts as," for example,
an open-ended question, seatwork activity, use of instructional aids
(e.g. audio-visual equipment), and many other individual features that
described what they saw on the tapes. They refined and produced a reliable
coding system in which two independent coders could make the same decision
at least 80% of the time. The codes provided the team with quantitative
indicators of how often specific teaching features appeared on each
tape. Although the coding system captured
many of the individual features of interest, individual features do
not tell the whole story. Stigler and Hiebert note, in their retrospective
account of the video study, that "What is important is how the
features fit together to form a whole. How does one feature connect
with the next one; how does an activity near the end of the lesson link
back with one at the beginning? This is a very different way to think
about teaching. It means that individual features make sense only in
terms of how they relate with others that surround them" (The
Teaching Gap, Free Press, Summer 1999). As an example, they cited the coded
category of teaching aids used in Japan and the U.S. Japanese teachers
use only chalkboards whereas U. S. teachers frequently use overhead
projectors. To simply count this as a technology difference misses a
major distinction in teaching systems. Japanese teachers could not use
overheads because they record on their chalkboards a running account
of the lesson, which they and the students use throughout the lesson.
The Japanese teachers emphasize relating ideas within a lesson. A different
system of teaching was observed in the U.S., a system that places greater
emphasis on collecting and holding students’ attention. Stigler and Hiebert came to the
conclusion that a "bottom-up" analysis strategy, by itself,
is insufficient because "Teaching is a [cultural] system . . .
not a loose mixture of individual features thrown together by the teacher"
(The Teaching Gap). They liken the individual features captured
in their codes to a mountain range poking above the surface of the water:
"The videotapes provide views of these mountaintop islands. But
still hidden, underneath the surface, are the mountain ranges."
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