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What
are some Features of Lesson Design? The
Conference, then, is organized around two questions:
What are the features of Lesson Design (a product or structural
question) and what are the processes of Japanese Lesson Study (a process
or narrative question)? On opening
night, Vickie Greenbaum (formerly a symphony violinist, 17 years a teacher,
BAWP consultant, teacher at Newark, Alameda, Menlo School, and now teaching
orchestra and English) set the stage for discussing what are the features
of Lesson Design. She started
with some of her own experiences and reflections.
She observed that a district she worked in had an assessment
that required a five-step plan (Madeline Hunter).
How, she asked, are we going to package any instructional goal
in five steps? One problem, she noted, is “the 38 ninth
graders in front of me----the human elements of interaction in the classroom,
the slow students, and the fast students. I had a carefully crafted
Anticipatory Set, but the problem was that the design did not fit the
constantly changing human interaction. The main element that eludes
design is “What is going to happen next?” She pushed the point: How does one give shape
to what happens in the classroom when the unexpected predominates? Don’t
these elements defy packages? How do we organize learning? Can we design what happens in our interactions
with human beings? Is teaching a private, intuitive act, not open
to “Design”? Vickie
then asked us to watch two videotapes of K-12 mathematics lessons, one
from Japan and one from the United States (both from the Stigler TIMSS
study). She then asked the Conference participants
to begin suggesting what differences they noted in the way Lessons were
designed in the two cases. Here
are some of the comments of participating teachers.
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