APA 5th Edition Template - Lesson Study Group at Mills College

Running head: LESSON STUDY AND THE TEST OF PRACTICE
Lesson Study and the Test of Practice
Jennifer M. Lewis
University of Michigan
Paper given at the Annual Conference of the American Educational
Research Association
April 14, 2009, San Diego, California
As the map of the United States becomes dotted with more and more
lesson study groups in schools across the nation, and lesson study is
mentioned with increasing frequency by scholars of mathematics education,
we will want to identify whether and how lesson study contributes to the
improvement of instruction. Typically, outcomes of professional development
are appraised in a number of ways: by the quality of analytic discussions
in the professional development sessions, the engagement of participants in
these sessions, teachers' self-reports, children's achievement measured in
different ways, qualitative studies of mathematics instruction, and, more
recently, teachers' achievement on paper-and-pencil measures on dimensions
such as mathematical knowledge for teaching (Hill, Schilling, & Ball,
2004). As important as all these outcomes are, I argue that measures of
mathematical quality in observed teaching are meaningful gauges of the
contributions that professional development makes to instructional
improvement, but also aligned to the specific practices of lesson study. As
Pianta and Hamre note in a recent article, "There is general consensus
within the educational community that the professional development of
teachers is of paramount importance. However, professional development
typically occurs in the absence of a direct link to actual teaching
behavior in classrooms, particularly for already trained teachers.
Systematic classroom observation systems provide a standard way of
measuring and noting teachers' strengths and weaknesses and evaluating
whether professional development activities are actually helping improve
classroom interactions" (Pianta & Hamre, 2009).
In this paper, I argue that the promise of lesson study owes in great
part to the fact that it is situated in practice. Stigler and Hiebert wrote
that "lesson study focuses on the direct improvement of teaching in
context" (1999, p. 122), and this is one of the significant features of
lesson study that distinguishes it from other forms of professional
development. And since the focus in lesson study is the direct improvement
of teaching in context, it follows that the appraisal of lesson study and
its contributions should be measures of teaching in context. To this end, I
propose an instrument to identify and measure the qualities of mathematical
instruction in research lessons from lesson study groups as a way to gauge
what teachers are learning in lesson study and how this contributes to the
improvement of mathematics instruction. I argue that observed interactive
instruction should be the object of our analysis, since it is into this
milieu that lesson study enters.
The paper is comprised of three parts. First, I describe the features
of lesson study that bring this professional development form to bear
directly on enacted instruction. Second, I consider why appraising the
mathematical quality of observed instruction might be a fitting way to
investigate lesson study's contribution to mathematics teaching and
learning. Finally, I describe the development of an observational
instrument for this purpose and discuss the qualities of a number of
research lessons using the proposed instrument. I conclude by suggesting a
research program for identifying lesson study's contributions to
instructional improvement.
First, a word about definitions. We want to make some careful
distinctions about terms that are often used nearly interchangeably. One
term that is found throughout this paper is instruction, and for our
purposes we use Cohen and Ball's (2001) definition of instruction:
"Although many people think of instruction as what teachers do, it consists
of interactions involving teachers, students, and content" (p. 75). That
is, instruction is more than just teaching and what the teacher does; it
includes how teachers work in interaction with students and content, and
these interactions proceed inside multiple contexts: the school setting,
the wider community, family and culture, nation. When we refer to
instruction, we are concerned with the interactions inside the classroom
but are cognizant that these contexts permeate the classroom in ways that
are both visible and invisible.
Related to instruction is the term practice. A source of confusion
about the word practice is that it is both a noun and a verb, and to add
complexity it is both a transitive and an intransitive verb! Selecting
from among the many definitions of practice found in the American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language,[1] here it is used to refer to
something teachers work on; a set of habitual acts or actions; a
professional mode of being. Pickering's work on scientific practice
emphasizes its performative, real-time, and agentic nature (1995) and these
are relevant to our use here. Practice, as distinct from instruction, then,
refers more expressly to teachers, what they work on, their habits, and
their professional ways of being.
We also use the term interactive practice in this paper to refer to a
specific kind of teaching practice: that which unfolds in real time in the
presence of students. THE PROMISE OF LESSON STUDY: WORK ON INTERACTIVE PRACTICE Grossman and McDonald (2008) argue that teacher education has come to
be dominated by "pedagogies of investigation" which emphasize the preactive
and reflective dimensions of practice but leave aside the development of
pedagogical skill in the interactive aspects of teaching. In contrast to
many other forms of professional development, the lesson study process is
rooted in the experience of interactive teaching. Teaching is, after all, a
predominantly interactive, clinical practice. That the pedagogies of
teacher education have veered to the less interactive renders these efforts
irrelevant or unusable for teachers. The lesson study process begins with
teachers formulating a problem to study drawn from their own practices.
Teachers' planning of a lesson is likewise anchored in the specifics of
teaching work, blending teachers' knowledge and experience with theory from
relevant academic and professional disciplines. Child psychology, research
mathematics, philosophy and other disciplines are drawn upon in the
planning of the lesson, but unlike other teacher education efforts, these
disciplines do not drive the lesson, but rather serve as resources for
teaching and learning in the context of a single lesson designed around a
real problem of practice. The lesson study group continues its
investigation by trying out a lesson with children in the presence of other
teachers-inside of interactive practice. The teachers reflect on the
outcomes of that lesson using teaching and learning as the criteria of
reference. The iterative steps that follow, reflection, redesign, teaching,
reflecting again, are also anchored in the interactive practice of teaching
as reference points, not some theoretical framework, policy document, or
disciplinary lens, although all these may be woven into the teachers'
appraisal and understanding of the lesson. Perhaps this seems obvious, that
teaching and learning should be the frames of reference in lesson study or
in professional development for teachers in general. Or it may seem
circular, that the very object of improvement is its own standard for
improvement. But modal teacher education experiences do not automatically
take as a starting point (or ending point) the realities of practice as a
complex dynamic. More often, teacher education approaches the improvement
of teaching piecemeal, where a single dimension of teaching work, or one
relevant discipline, is addressed. In inservice training, there are often
single-session workshops treating either a new policy affecting teachers
(Individual Education Plans for special education students) or a new
technique (cooperative learning) or a new resource (a new mathematics
curriculum). These workshops are isolated from interactive practice in
their presentation and leave it to the teacher to apply in the interactive
phase of instruction. Even long-term, discipline-rich professional
development interventions such as that described by Grossman, Wineburg and
Woolworth (2001) do not take practice as a point of departure. In this
professional development effort, teachers gathered to read together in the
fields of English and history over a period of years-despite the fact that
they are subject-matter rich, collaborative and long-term efforts. How
teachers were to make use of this professional development experience in
practice, however, was left unspecified. In mathematics professional
development experiences, teacher may make use of records of practice-
student work, videotapes of classroom lessons, mathematics-- or
mathematics problems geared for teacher learning. Teachers discuss and
reflect on these resources, working in small groups to talk about what they
noticed in a video or how they solved the mathematics problem or what
students seemed to understand by examining their written work. Like other
teacher education efforts, teachers' translations of such inputs into
interactive practice in their classrooms are left for teachers to figure
out on their own.
In contrast, the work of lesson study is shaped by problems of
practice, and ultimately returns to instruction as the site for its field-
testing. Problems of practice are lesson study's point of departure, and
practice is its endpoint as well. The "text" of the professional
development experience is a problem from practice. The work on this
problem, inside the specifics of instruction, constitutes the professional
development experience