The Spirit of Lesson Study

“This is going to be about more than just this lesson, right?” There it was. The moment in every Lesson Study where my chest tightens and I fling myself into the unknown, the unscripted. I stood in the hallway and nodded, “Just wait, Cathy.”

The process for Lesson Study is planned out; norms to be set, articles to read and discuss, protocols for lesson analysis and rewriting, forms for data collection and debriefing. Yet, in every Lesson Study there is a hinge, a turning that cannot be articulated in a plan. The cycle becomes larger than the day’s lesson; it becomes professional dialogue.  I am tempted to say there is magic involved, for there is a spirit of Lesson Study that is hard to capture and explain. While I never know ahead of time when in each Lesson Study the magic will happen, happen it always does. And why? Because Lesson Study teaches us how to talk.

In listening to teams reflect on their Lesson Study experiences, I hear them trying to capture the spirit of Lesson Study.  Sometimes it is a five-person team with experience levels from novice to veteran and everything in between. Sometimes it is a two-person team that has worked and planned together for years. Sometimes it is a team of people new to each other brought together by Lesson Study itself. What they all have in common, however, is this new way of talking that is inhabited by the energy of learning and a deep commitment to professionalism.

Often, when I am introducing Lesson Study to teachers, they ask questions about spending so much time on one lesson. And at first Lesson Study seems to be defined by putting one lesson under a microscope and planning out all the details.  But the process changes us and teaches us to be better teammates than we were, better teachers than we were, because we have learned to talk.

Cathy and her team went back to debrief on the math lesson they had all just observed. They shared their data, their questions, and their thinking. They named the qualities of a lesson, and any possible revision ideas they had. Then it happened, the spirit of Lesson Study entered. They talked about working together. They talked about the importance and value of sharing instructional ideas. They talked about the difference between naming what they are teaching and talking about how they are teaching. They talked and talked and talked. We left different than when we started. Lesson Study teaches us how to talk and it is magical!

Hollins Mills has been working as an instructional coach for the Albemarle County Public Schools for the last two years. Prior to that she was a Title One teacher, a first grade teacher and a fourth grade teacher. She lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.