Lesson study comes of age in North America

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 88, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 273-281

  Lewis, Catherine ^a   Perry, Rebecca ^a   Hurd, Jacqueline ^b,c   O'Connell, Mary Pat ^d  

^a MILLS COLLEGE   (United States)

^b Highlands Elementary School   (United States)

^c Palo Alto Unified School District   (United States)

^d High Lands Elementary

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846295579     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170608800406     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. See Sonal Chokshi and Clea Fernandez, "Challenges to Importing Japanese Lesson Study: Concerns, Misconceptions, and Nuances," Phi Delta Kappan, March 2004, pp. 520-25;
2. Clea Fernandez and Sonal Chokshi, "A Practical Guide to Translating Lesson Study for a U.S. Setting," Phi Delta Kappan, October 2002, pp. 128-34;
3. and Wellford W. Wilms, "Altering the Structure and Culture of American Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, April 2003, pp. 606-15.
4. Practical guidance on lesson study can be found in Catherine Lewis, Lesson Study: A Handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change (Philadelphia: Research for Better Schools, 2002);
5. and Patsy Wang-Iverson and Makoto Yoshida, eds., Building Our Understanding of Lesson Study (Philadelphia: Research for Better Schools, 2005). Additional resources on lesson study can be found at www.lessonresearch. net; www.rbs.org; www.tc.edu/lessonstudy/whatislessonstudy.html; and www.globaledresources.com.
6. San Mateo-Foster City School District serves more than 10,000 K-8 students. Its ethnic composition in 2004-05 was 38% white, 30% Hispanic, 19% Asian, 3% African American, 3% Pacific Islander, 4% Filipino, and 3% other. Highlands School's ethnic composition in 2004-05 was 50% white, 15% Hispanic, 25% Asian, 3% African American, 4% Filipino, and 4% other (due to rounding, these numbers do not add up to 100). Eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch was 31% of district students and 17% of Highlands students.
7. James W. Stigler and James Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (New York: Summit Books, 1999).
8. The SMFC reform coordinator and coaches contacted Catherine Lewis and Rebecca Perry at the outset in order to tap their knowledge of lesson study, which Lewis had been studying in Japan for a decade. Soon after, Lewis and Perry were invited in as researchers to observe the SMFC lesson study teams and provide occasional feedback.
9. The funds used included a combination of public (Elsenhower Grant) money and private foundation funding for the improvement of instruction within a particular group of district schools.
10. James Spillane, "Cognition and Policy Implementation: District Policy-makers and the Reform of Instruction," Cognition and Instruction, vol. 18, 2000, pp. 141-79.
11. All quotations are from a planning meeting, 11 November 2002.
12. To rule out competing hypotheses about causes of die increasing achievement, we identified other reform efforts that Highlands participated in between 2001 and 2005 and identified all other elementary schools (five) that participated in them. Gains in achievement for students who remained at each of these schools for longer than one year were compared with gains for all students who remained in the district. Only one school other than Highlands showed any statistically significant achievement gains relative to the district as a whole, and that school did not show sustained gains over three years.
13. For examples of further resources created at SMFC, see videos by the Mills College Lesson Study Group, Oakland, Calif., "How Many Seats? Excerpts from a Lesson Study Cycle" (2005), "To Open a Cube" (2003), and "Can You Find the Area?" (2003), available at www.lessonresearch. net. See also Jacqueline Hurd and Lori Licciardo-Musso, "Lesson Study: Teacher-Led Professional Development in Literacy," Language Arts, May 2005, pp. 388-95.
14. Antonio Machado, "Proverbs and Songs," #29, in Betty Jean Craige, trans., Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, available at www.cha.uga.edu/ bjc/machado.htm.
15. Mills College Lesson Study Group, "How Many Seats?"
16. David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
17. Michael Fullan, The New Meaning of Educational Change, 3rd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
18. For descriptions of the other types of lesson study, their systemic impact in Japan, and the role of university-based researchers, see Catherine Lewis and Ineko Tsuchida, "Planned Educational Change in Japan: The Case of Elementary Science Instruction," Journal of Educational Policy, vol. 12, 1997, pp. 313-31;
19. idem, "A Lesson Is Like a Swiftly Flowing River: Research Lessons and the Improvement of Japanese Education," American Educator, Winter 1998, pp. 14-17, 50-52;
20. Tad Watanabe, "Learning from Japanese Lesson Study," Educational Leadership, March 2002, pp. 36-39;
21. and Tad Watanabe and Patsy Wang-Iverson, "The Role of Knowledgeable Others," in Patsy Wang-Iverson and Makoto Yoshida, eds., Building Our Understanding of Lesson Study (Philadelphia: Research for Better Schools, 2005).
22. Catherine Lewis, Ineko Tsuchida, and Samuel Coleman, "The Creation of Japanese and U.S. Elementary Science Textbooks: Different Processes, Different Outcomes," in Gary DeCoker, ed., National Standards and School Reform in Japan and the United States (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), pp. 46-66;
23. and Catherine Lewis, "What Is a Science Text?," in Alan Peacock and Ailie Cleghorn, eds., Missing the Meaning: The Development and Use of Print and Non-print Learning Materials (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), pp. 61-72.
24. For efforts to counter this situation, see Committee for a Review of the Evaluation Data on the Effectiveness of NSF-Supported and Commercially Generated Mathematics Curriculum Materials et al., On Evaluating Curricular Effectiveness: Judging the Quality of K-12 Mathematics Evaluations (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004).
25. Richard F. Elmore, "Getting to Scale with Good Education Practice," Harvard Educational Review, vol. 66, 1996, p. 4.