Lesson Study Resources
End of Cycle Workshop
May 21, 2003
8:00 Coffee and breakfast
8:30 Workshop Overview
The goals for this workshop were to have participants learn about mathematics
with an eye on student understanding, continue learning about lesson
study, continue building a community of lesson study practitioners,
and to have participants celebrate their work with their teams and make
plans for their future work.
8:40 Math Session: Uncovering Student Understanding
During this session, we first had participants select a topic that they
wanted to work on for part of the session. (See the Math Resources section
for specific math problems.) Then, participants worked on the mathematics
themselves, before reading a case written about students doing a similar
problem. (See the Print References section for citations on the cases.)
Finally, participants discussed the case with an eye toward what students
understood in the scenario and what the broader implications of asking
students “open” questions might be.
10:20 Break
10:35 Lesson Study Reading Discussion
The foundation of this session was an article written by Clea Fernandez,
Joanna Cannon and Sonal Chokshi on critical lenses lesson study practitioners
need to develop in order to do lesson study effectively. Participants
were randomly divided into 10 reading discussion groups, 5 of which
focused on the Curriculum Developer Lens and 5 of which focused on the
Researcher Lens. For the purpose of this session, and with the permission
of the authors, we created abstracts of the article highlighting the
2 lenses. After reading individually, each small group self-facilitated
a discussion using questions provided by us. We then concluded the session
by sharing big ideas people were taking away from their abstract of
the article. [Fernandez, C., Cannon, J., & Chokshi, S. (2003). A
U.S.-Japan lesson study collaboration reveals critical lenses for examining
practice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 19(2), 171-185.]
12:00 LUNCH
12:30 Sharing Your Work
We ran a mini-conference so that participants could hear about other
teams research lessons that were of particular interest to them. During
lunch, we distributed a 1 page abstract of each team’s research
lesson so that individuals and teams could strategically attend presentations.
We had 4 groups presenting at a time in 4 distinct locations. We encouraged
groups to present a summary of their lesson in about 5 minutes, and
to leave about 10 minutes for questions and discussion with their audience.
2:00 Team Meeting
We encouraged our participants to celebrate their work and to reflect
on what they had enjoyed most during their lesson study work. We asked
teams to tell us about their plans for their summer work and to begin
thinking about changes they want to make in how they do lesson study.
3:15 Wrap-up, End of Day Evaluation
3:30 ADJOURN
