Washington Post Staff Writer 
Friday, October 9, 2009; 3:47 PM

At Reed, math scores on the District’s Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) standardized test have risen substantially since teachers began practicing lesson study — proficiency rates have more than doubled since 2007 to 74 percent. However, the school was one of six in the District with high concentrations of erasures on the 2008 tests. Principal Dayo Akinsheye attributed the high number of erasures to students having two hours to complete each 20-minute test, leaving plenty of time to check work and change answers.

Education researchers James Stigler and James Hiebert first popularized lesson study in the United States in 1999, when they published a book called “The Teaching Gap,”in which they compared education in cultures from around the globe. They described a Japanese system in which teachers are constantly examining and tweaking their practice rather than attempting wholesale reform, as has failed so many times in America.

“The evidence is pretty good that the only kind of improvements in teaching that are going to be sustainable are going to be small, incremental improvements,” Stigler said in an interview.

Lesson study is a way to organize those small improvements. Teachers work together on a “research lesson,” sometimes over the course of an entire year. They identify an objective, come up with a way to teach it and then script students’ anticipated misunderstandings and the teacher’s response to those misunderstandings.

One member of the group teaches the lesson in front of observers, who are instructed to record students’ responses and reactions. They don’t evaluate the individual teacher; the lesson has been created by a group, after all, and the purpose is to discover how it is received by students.

“We’re looking at the child and the thinking that you see evolving as the lesson progresses,” said Akinsheye, who is a member of the lesson study group. “That takes away a lot of the concern that teachers have.”

After a post-lesson discussion among the teacher and observers about what worked and what didn’t, the group revises and re-teaches.

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What eventually bleeds from discrete research lessons into everyday practice, teachers said, is noticing whether students get it – learning to ask questions that elicit what a student is thinking, where that student is going wrong and therefore what it will take to correct her misconception.

“In the U.S., frequently students are trying to figure out what is in the teacher’s mind. What answer is the teacher looking for?” said Patsy Wang-Iverson, a consultant who has studied and written about the Japanese method for a decade and who now acts as the Reed teachers’ mentor. “In Japan, teachers are trying to figure out what is in the student’s mind — how they’re thinking, what they’re thinking and the source of their misunderstanding.”

At Reed, lesson study was spurred by Akinsheye, a former math resource teacher. Three years ago, she sent two teachers to observe a research lesson in Patterson, N.J., at the first public American school to adopt lesson study in the late ’90s. When they returned wanting to try it at Reed, Akinsheye got a $47,000 grant from the school system and hired Wang-Iverson. This year, the program is expanding to include teachers in every grade.

The culture at Reed has changed as a result of the weekly meetings, said faculty. Teachers don’t feel isolated as they face the daunting challenge of raising achievement in a school where 94 percent of the 319 students are poor and two-thirds struggle with English. They chat at the Xerox machine about partitive division. Bethel called Gomez after 10 p.m. one night last week to talk about multiplication arrays.

“You don’t stay in a corner there wondering, how do I teach this?” said Elinor Stephens, a fourth-grade teacher.

Lesson study also bolsters a teacher’s own grasp of math concepts during a stage in the research lesson cycle called kyozaikenkyu, or intensive learning. Teachers at Reed have assigned one another math homework. Last spring, they all took an online math course through M.I.T., and in addition to deepening their content knowledge, they learned humility.

“We all had gaps in our understanding of elementary mathematics,” said Bethel.

The larger benefit of lesson study, proponents say, is to push the conversation about improving teaching beyond luring more highly qualified people into schools to helping teachers grow once they have landed in the classroom.

“If we believe all students can learn, then the corollary to that is all teachers can improve,” said Wang-Iverson. “That is at the heart of lesson study.”

Source: Washington Post