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The Range of Participatng Roles Several
participants noted that the Japanese Lesson had a variety of participating
roles for students: Problem on board Teacher talks Students listen/ Students work Alone--------Students work--------Student reports (1)—(2) Teacher monitors In
small group/ to whole class The
US classroom, on the other hand, had the teacher leading the whole class
through problems all period. The
few small group interactions seemed loosely or informally organized.
No presentations by students at the Board. Pat Egenberger notes said:
“Students were problem solving on their own. Students were invited
to think as a team. You review, pose a problem, they work individually,
take them to the next level.” The
Use of the Chalk Board The
Japanese Lesson gave special emphasis to the Chalk Board, letting the
Lesson emerge on the Board as a record of the Problem and a record of
the student approaches to solving the problem. Ruth Nathan and Joan
Owen observed that the Chalk Board became an emerging painting or portrait
of the Lesson itself. In addition, the teacher put the problem on the
Board as a strip of banner paper, highlighting its central importance
in the emerging portrait. These
touches suggested that the Japanese teacher had roughly planned the
use of the black board.
Pat
Egenberger noted: “The overhead doesn’t show all the work. The
overhead becomes an attention-focusing design. The chalkboard
holds things. In the Japanese classroom the chalkboard is owned by everyone
and the overhead in the American classroom belongs to the teacher.” The
Purposes of Homework Pat
Egenberger’s summary includes the following: “The homework is exploratory.
You were not practicing something you learned in class. He
would pose a new problem and see if they could guess how to do it. Expectation
that the students will do the homework.” The
Focus: One Central, Broad Problem or Several Small
(Right and Wrong) Problems The
US teacher used an overhead projector. The teacher planned to use the
overhead projector to go down a list of problems and ask the students
for answers. Unlike the chalkboard, the students could not easily use
the overhead projector to display their approaches to a problem and,
as one possible result, they did not do so. On the other hand, the use
of the overhead projector enabled the U.S.
teachers to state the problem for the whole class to see. The
Japanese teachers accomplished the same goal with a paper banner. But, as several participants suggested (----------------------)
the Japanese Lesson was focused on one key problem (with several underlying
skills), and the US Lesson was focused on several topics or skills with
few or no transitions (OK, next problem).
In other words, the organization of the US Lesson would have
required many different banners pasted on the blackboard.
Pat Egenberger made the following observation: “The teacher in
a Japanese geometry class was focusing on a broad concept. His
role is to show the path. It's up to the students to go down the
path. In the American classroom the teacher is the source of the
right answer...crank out the right answer.
I understood what she was saying. I started shutting down.
There is not the same as permission to make mistakes. It
was so cookbook. She says you¹re wrong. Kids take a risk
and are told they¹re wrong. It didn¹t have that spirit of exploration.”
Said Pat E: “The examples all built on each other in the Japanese lesson.
The lesson kept taking the concept from a different angle.” Distribution
of Discussion One
issue eliciting some extended comment from conference participants was
the question of how much student comment was spread around the room.
Both the U.S. teacher and the Japanese teacher moved around the
room. But the spread-of-comment
was a little difficult to judge because of camera angles.
This raised the point that video-tapes of lessons, although especially
useful because of playback capabilities, did not give us the view of
a room we need to make some determinations. Connecting
this One Day to Other Days Two
participants commented on how the Japanese teacher referred back to
problems considered in prior lessons, and at the end suggested something
about the next day’s lesson. Getting
Started One
participant commented on how the Lesson started with a Lesson starter.
The Lesson starter gave them something to work the moment they
entered the room. The
Experiential and the Symbolic The
Japanese Lesson problem was presented first as a Narrative Problem (“A
Man wanted to purchase a piece of land that…) and later as Symbolic
Problem (a numerical procedure). In the U.S. Lesson all of the problems
were Symbolic. Tightly
and Loosely Organized Groups The
groups in both the Japanese and the US classroom were loosely organized.
US groups seemed more like students who were sitting adjacent
to one another. A loosely organized group does not have specific
roles such as group recorder, group chair, and so forth. Said one participant, “Literature Circles are
like a Madeline Hunter plan for small group interaction.” I think it was Joan Owen who said some teachers
found the Daniels plan for Literature Circles too restrictive. The
Subject Matter There
was considerable comment throughout the discussion about the fact that
if we did not know the subject matter well (mathematics), then we had
some difficulty determining what Lesson features we were observing.
Or determining even the choices the teachers made in the selection
and sequencing of subject matter. On another variable, Pat Egenberger notes that
in a poorer Japanese school the lesson worked the same way, even without
the computer and nice uniforms.
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