Welcome to Lesson Study!
My second year of graduate work took place in the 2020-2021 school year—my first year lead teaching in my own classroom! Over the course of the year, my cohort and I engaged in three cycles of Lesson Study. Each of these cycles involved setting equity and content goals for our lesson, digging through existing research around those goals, designing a lesson plan and data collection methods, and (eventually) teaching the lesson, collecting the data, and analyzing the results.
If this seems like an impractical planning process for a single lesson, you're right. It is. But over the course of the year, I found that to be part of the beauty of Lesson Study. Though I won't be able to root every single lesson I teach in this much research, I look forward to continuing to draw upon this year as evidence that when we learn more about great teaching we become better teachers. Similarly, I look forward to continuing to draw upon the expertise of the great teachers around me.
If you're interested in seeing other Lesson Studies, check out this one done by a team of HTH teachers in MAIC, the Mathematical Agency Improvement Community. (It also features three of my wonderful professors from this year—Curtis Taylor, Kristin Komatsubara, and Sarah Strong!)
If this seems like an impractical planning process for a single lesson, you're right. It is. But over the course of the year, I found that to be part of the beauty of Lesson Study. Though I won't be able to root every single lesson I teach in this much research, I look forward to continuing to draw upon this year as evidence that when we learn more about great teaching we become better teachers. Similarly, I look forward to continuing to draw upon the expertise of the great teachers around me.
If you're interested in seeing other Lesson Studies, check out this one done by a team of HTH teachers in MAIC, the Mathematical Agency Improvement Community. (It also features three of my wonderful professors from this year—Curtis Taylor, Kristin Komatsubara, and Sarah Strong!)