Lesson Study

The seminar experience will include professional development for all participants: university student, supervising elementary teacher, and university faculty member through the implementation of Lesson Study. Lesson Study is a process that facilitates a systematic examination of teaching-learning processes through the actual planning, observation, and reflection of teaching practices. The primary goal of Lesson Study is to provide optimal learning experiences for learners. Inherent in the process are opportunities for those who are teaching to think critically and intently about the content, the learners, the methodology, and the outcomes. An important component of Lesson Study is the collaborative participation, which affords diverse ideas, multiple methodologies, and richer pool of experiences and understandings.

The main activity in Lesson Study is for groups of teachers (in our program teachers include the above stated participants) to work on a small number of study lessons, which teachers collaboratively plan and teach to examine content and practice. The Lesson Study process includes: planning a research lesson, implementing the research lesson, reflecting through video data and/or participant observations, improving the research lesson, implementing the refined lesson, reflecting on the redesigned lesson, and reporting the that which was learning from the process.