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The
Introduction of Lesson Design in the United States John
Dewey could be said to have introduced contemporary Lesson Design to
the United States when he opened his lab school at the University of
Chicago in the 1890s and began to formulate what he called the Project
Method. In a 1921 article, William
C. Bagley called the Project Method “a constructive achievement of the
first magnitude,” and, at the same time, he identified three dangers
in the Project Method: a reduction in the transfer value of what is
learned, an emphasis on non-purposive learning, and an exclusive emphasis
on the instrumental values of knowledge. Myers (2002) has argued that Robert Romano
and Tom Gage have shown us how cd and web technology may have reduced
or even eliminated these problems in the project method, problems that
print-based projects could never quite overcome.
One example of the general failure of the Project Method in print-based
materials is James Moffett’s Interaction Series. Romano worked with Moffett to re-design these print-based materials
as CD and web-based interactions on a computer, and the result has been
very promising. In
any case, Dewey’s idea of the Project Method as an especially effective
approach to Lesson Design eventually found its way to Japan, and as
Makoto Yoshida noted in his conference talk, when Dewey’s
Lesson ideas, particularly his Project Method, went to Japan many years
ago, Japanese teachers undertook a full-scale implementation of the
Project Method in their classes. They
discovered, as many U.S. teachers had discovered, that achievement results
of the Project Method were mixed. Sometimes
achievement results were excellent, and sometimes achievement results
were bad. The Japanese then
decided to shift their focus from Dewey’s specific emphasis on the Project
Method to Dewey’s more general emphasis on Lesson Study, one of the
hallmarks of his lab school. I
am arguing that this change was critical because it shifted from promoting
one method to examining the elements of Lessons Design in many approaches. Here,
we encounter a fascinating story. Remember
that W. Edwards Deming’s production ideas went to Japan, helped create
a new Japanese way of producing automobiles (Standardized Work, Continuous
Improvement, and Just in Time Inventory, for example), and returned
to the United States as a revolution in assembly line production.
Well, it appears that John Dewey’s ideas went to Japan, helped
create a new approach to Lesson Design, and returned to the United States
in 2000 as Japanese Lesson Study, now underway in Patterson, New Jersey,
and San Mateo, California, to name two of the twenty or more sites we
heard reports from over the weekend. All of these Lesson Study projects
share one central assumption: teachers
know something valuable about their work, and Lesson Study, through
a three-step process, can provide a way to get at this valuable knowledge:
(1) provide a framework for teacher collaboration in the analysis of
lessons, (2) provide a knowledge base of past Lessons which have passed
the review process (called Research Lessons), and (3) make teaching
visible through observation and reports.
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