UNIT 32 LESSON STUDY

This innovative teaching way is a professional development process that Japanese teachers engage in to systematically examine their practice, with the goal of becoming more effective. This examination centers on teachers working collaboratively on a small number of "study lessons".

Lesson study is a simple idea. If you want to improve instruction, what could be more obvious than collaborating with fellow teachers to plan, observe, and reflect on lessons? (Lewis 2002)

From that quote I can reveal that lesson study is mainly based in cooperative and group work in which teachers support each other ideas in planning, teaching, observing, revising and sharing the results of a single class lesson or unit lesson. According to this website (http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/lsp/overview.htm) it suggest that teachers follow these steps:

Form a Team: Teams are usually composed of 3-6 instructors.

Develop Learning Goals: Team members articulate what they would like students to know and be able to do as a result of the lesson.

Design the Lesson: The team designs a lesson to achieve the learning goals.

Plan the Study: The team decides how to observe and collect evidence of student learning.

Teach and Observe: One team member teaches the lesson while others observe and collect evidence of student learning.

Analyze and Revise: The team discusses the results and assesses student progress toward learning goals.

Document and Disseminate: The team documents the lesson study and shares their work with colleagues.

I love this way of working since the benefits are huge, primarily students because they are going to work over a precisely done lesson plan and definitely it is going easier for them to achieve the objectives of the class. Professors as well as they learn new thing each time they cooperate on the lesson plan developing because the process they follow is not that simple, the may have to do a lot of research.

SOURCES:

http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/lsp/overview.htm

http://www.tc.columbia.edu/lessonstudy/lessonstudy.html

http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/a-different-approach-to-teacher-learning-lesson-study/

http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin382.shtml