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A
New Period of Lesson Study and Lesson Design? And
this brings us to what appears to be a newly emerging third period of
K-12 school reform, a period focused on Lesson Study and Lesson Design. This new approach to school improvement was signaled by, among other
things, the comment of James Stigler and James Hiebert: “If you want to improve teaching, the most
effective place to do so is in the context of the classroom lesson”
(The Teaching Gap, 1999, page 111).
Lee Shulman observed about their book The Teaching Gap, “A revolutionary
book…brilliantly documents the ways in which America’s teaching rather
than its teachers, contributes to deficits in student learning.” In other words, teacher-by-teacher evaluations.
Credential requirements, the Credential Commission’s CFAST program,
and the Lesson mandates of
the California State Board of Education (through the staff development
providers selected by the State Board) may all be missing the mark because
they are built around an inventory of what “favorite” teachers do, not
an overall analysis of Lesson Design, making visible the structure of
classroom teaching itself.
To
understand what Lesson Study or Lesson Design adds up to---what are
its features, how it is organized, how it is implemented, how it is
evaluated---one needs to consult several strands of thinking: the work
of Day Higuchi and other teacher union leaders interested in taking
more responsibility for curriculum change; the work of Buzz Wilms (UCLA)
who helps us understand the design of work in automobile and airplane
production; the research of Deone Zell who helps us understand how a
cultural practice is “diffused” (not delivered) throughout an institution; the work of Pamela
Grossman and Peter Williamson at Stanford who examine how to translate
subject matter knowledge into pedagogy (Lesson Design); the work of
Mokoto Yoshida who analyzes the process of Lesson Study in both
Japan and Patterson, New Jersey; the work of James Stigler and his colleagues
(Mitch Gordon) at the LessonLab in Los Angeles, especially the way LessonLab
analyzes lessons in its software; the work of Catherine Lewis at Mills
College, including how Lesson Study has been implemented in Mary Pat
O’Connell’s school in San Mateo; the work of Charlotte Higuchi in the
UTLA Lesson Study project, showing the importance of publication and
parent participation in the Lesson Study process and showing the importance
of teacher-made assessments in guiding Lesson Design in the teaching
of Literature; the work of Ann Watkins at the New Teacher Center in
Santa Cruz and her use of the Lesson Design approach of Grant Wiggins,
especially his notion of understanding and backward planning in Lesson
Design; the TeachScape (Jonathan
Denholtz) approach to internet case studies of teaching, shaped in part
by the work of Roy Pea, who sits on the TeachScape Board of Directors
and who heads up the new Institute in Learning Sciences and Technologies
at Stanford University; the work of
Kathy Egawa, NCTE staff rep who is one of the leaders of the
MARCO POLO project at NCTE; Kai Chu and Eileen Moy at Humboldt State University
on Internet dissemination. These
individuals were either speakers at the conference and/or their work
guided the discussions
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