Leaping Before We Looked: A Rookie 5th Grade Teacher's Perspective on Lesson Study

Looking back on how little my teammates and I knew about lesson study, I am in awe of how much my teammates and I have been able to grow since we started our journey in October of 2010.

As a rookie teacher, I loved the idea of actually having a structured time and format to sit with my teammates and discuss the planning and teaching of a lesson in detail. Recalling what I actually thought I knew about lesson study at the time is really quite embarrassing.

1. It is about lessons.
2. We will study a lesson.

At my team’s first official lesson study meeting we were in for an information overload. Our facilitator, Christine Paul, needed patience (and a lot of it). As she began to clarify our misunderstandings and misconceptions, it became clear that lesson study is not about immediate answers, solutions, and strategies.

Rather, my team was preparing to embark on a journey of self-reflection. My veteran colleagues would have to challenge themselves to analyze their methods and philosophies of teaching. I would not receive an easy pass and be dismissed as a know-nothing novice. As we began to plan our first lesson together, I knew that my own ideas would be just as valuable as my experienced teammates.

It’s Not About the Lesson!

Since then my team has participated in four cycles of lesson study. Each time we have met, I have found that my team has grown stronger in our ability to meaningfully engage our students. To the relief of Christine, we have moved away from the idea that lesson study is about creating the perfect lesson. It is not! We have come to fully realize and appreciate that the lesson is merely the vehicle that we use to investigate different strategies and gather data.

The collective ownership that my teammates and I take over the lessons that we create has helped my team develop a greater understanding of the strengths and the challenges that we each face in our classrooms. After each lesson we teach, the conversations that we have about what worked well and what could be improved provide valuable feedback for our entire team about what we can do to meet the needs of all the learners in our classroom. The results from our past lesson study cycles have had a lasting impact on the way I approach my daily planning and teaching.

Extreme Makeover: Four Big Changes in my Classroom

1. During my daily lesson planning, I constantly find myself questioning what it is that I want my students to actually do and how can they show me what they have accomplished. In the beginning, I found that many of my lessons were engaging but I was often asking my students to do too much. In lesson study, our facilitator always reminds my teammates and I to keep our lessons focused to one or two central academic and social goals. By developing the habit of creating lessons that have a specific purpose, I have found that my students have been able to more successfully meet the learning targets that have I set for them.
2. I have also become much more aware of the value of student think time and discussion. In our first lesson study cycle, we found that the ratio of teacher to student talking time was way out of proportion in favor of the teacher. We were shocked to see how little time we were actually giving the students to speak, ask and wonder. Since this lesson study experience, I have found that I am much more aware of how much time I spend speaking versus how much time I allow my students to question, comment, and share.
3. We also found that in a classroom of engaged learners, students tend to engage with the content and activities even if it may appear otherwise. I am definitely guilty of quieting a student who was whispering to a neighbor during a focus lesson. I discovered during lesson study that many of these sly side comments that I would perceive as off-task behavior were in fact examples of my students thinking about the topics and questions I had posed to them! Now, I always ensure that I give my students ample time to think and share their own thoughts before moving on to another task.
4. Lastly, in our third cycle of lesson study my team was specifically looking for students to show their ability to explain their thinking in response to open-ended questions. However, even though we created a carefully planned lesson and built in many opportunities for students to think and respond critically, we found that we did not meet our intended goal. After looking at our data, we found that the number of open-ended questions we asked was overshadowed by closed yes-and-no questions. From this, I took away that if I want my students to be creative thinkers, I need to make sure I am giving all of my students enough opportunities to exercise this skill.

Duh! Old Ideas with a New Focus

Throughout our lesson study cycles and post-teaching debriefings I have realized that my observations are not groundbreaking ideas. The idea of having focused lessons, allowing for student think time and trusting the innate desire of students to learn is not new. I knew that I should be doing all of these things all along.

However, participating in lesson study allowed my grade-level team to actually look at how we were implementing these strategies. Lesson study provided a framework for structured collaboration that allowed my teammates and I to have the time and resources necessary to actually share and analyze each other’s practices. Lesson study has raised my awareness about what I am doing well and what I can do to enhance my teaching so that I can make my classroom the most successful learning environment possible for my students.

As my team enters our second year of lesson study, we are looking forward to building on the growth that we have made over the last year. We will continue to use lesson study as a tool to help us develop as educators so that we may recognize all of the talents, strategies, and knowledge that we can incorporate into our practice to make each day a challenging and productive experience for our students.

Eben Montaquila is a 5th grade teacher at Sunrise Valley Elementary School in Reston, VA. He has taught 5th grade since 2009 and is participating in his second year of lesson study. Eben has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Elementary Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.