Professor David Pedder on promising Lesson Study work his team is developing with Leicester Teaching Schools

Promoting Lesson Study as Practically Useful R+D and Joint Practice Development in schools in Leicester.
Professor David Pedder, University of Leicester
dp243@leicester.ac.uk
The University of Leicester School of Education is currently working with our three Teaching School Alliance partners – Brooke Weston, Affinity (Kibworth Primary) and Leicester (Rushey Mead Secondary) to develop Lesson Study approaches for addressing specific learning problems experienced by students and their teachers in the classroom.
Lesson Study is proving to be a powerful and very popular form of practically useful R+D and joint practice development largely because of its direct relevance to the classroom concerns and responsibilities of teachers. One reason why Lesson Study is taking off here is because the starting point is the problems and puzzles of teaching expressed by teachers in schools. Lesson Study provides a constructive and practical context for seeing specific ‘problems’ that teachers face every day at school in a positive light.
Lesson Study provides a practical framework and context to help teachers view the ‘problems’ they face in the classroom as opportunities for growth and practice development; problems lead teachers to ask serious questions about their practice that they themselves can address. Teachers we work with ask: how do I help my students learn how to divide fractions? How do I build in thinking skills into my classroom teaching? How can I take into account the backgrounds, knowledge and experience of the Bangladeshi girls in my class?
We are finding that teachers are increasingly turning to Lesson Study approaches to address these ‘problems’ and begin to question current practice as part of an exciting and challenging inquiry process. It is the teachers who start to build practical theories of their own devising that they can apply to ‘problem’ contexts and that other teachers can learn from and build on. Instead of looking for solutions off-the-peg, schools are finding in Lesson Study an approach that is helping them develop their own bespoke, well-tailored practical theories and practice solutions. These practical theories and solutions, developed by teachers through their joint work in Lesson Study teams, form the basis for a powerful and practically useful knowledge base that grows out of the demands of specific school and classroom settings.
The challenge is always to go public with the knowledge teachers develop in this way. Too often the insights and solutions that teachers and leaders develop in the face of real problems in specific contexts with real students never get shared beyond occasional conversations and anecdotes with colleagues. To address this tendency, the University of Leicester is working with school leaders to promote networking and cultural change across schools in Teaching School Alliances – that will be another story.