Toshiya Chichibu writes
On 15th November 2012 I was with Pete Dudley at Kazakhstan’s international conference for teacher professional development which featured a number of symposia on action research, on coaching and mentoring, and on Lesson Study.
Pete and I were the main international speakers at the Lesson Study symposium attended by around 150 teachers and trainers from right across Kazakhstan. (Kazakhstan is a huge country – the same size as Western Europe). Participants in the symposium were very motivated to conduct lesson study in their cities.
Prior to the conference, I had spent four months (from April to July 2012) in Kazakhstan. I visited many cities and met lots of teachers in Kazakh schools and I discovered that Kazakh teachers have a long history of conducting ‘open lessons’. In the open lesson system, it is the professional duty of every teacher to open a lesson up to invited colleagues each year. However, unlike Lesson Study they don’t have the opportunity to plan the lesson together or to discuss it afterwards. Consequently the teacher of the open lesson receives little formative feedback and teachers miss opportunities to increase the effectiveness of classroom observation for improving pupil learning and teaching.
In my view the lesson improving system that is proposed by Pete in his Lesson Study handbook (the new 4th edition of which will be downloadable free from this site from 2nd January 2014) is clearly helping Kazakh teachers. The handbook has been translated into Kazakh and Russian and is widely used by the regional Centers of Excellence in Teaching and Learning who form the backbone of Kazakhstan’s school improvement system. Especially useful are his ideas of case students who form a focal point for planning and discussing the pupil learning in research lessons and who may give new viewpoints to improve lessons in post research lesson pupil interviews. I think this is something that is not only effective in Kazakhstan but could be adopted in Japan as well.
My own message in the symposium was to stress the importance to Kazakh teachers of another aspect of Lesson Study, which is the importance of constructing and maintaining learning community in school. In Japanese Lesson Study, teachers emphasize teamwork or group harmony when they discuss a research lesson. If an observer of the research lesson were to criticize the teacher directly, he or she may not want to participate in further lesson studies or open lessons. I emphasized this point because I particularly remember a teacher whose lesson I observed in Kazakhstan who was terribly nervous about being given negative feedback in the lesson. Such nervousness prevents teachers from trying out new ideas and can lead them to teach formulaic ‘safe’ lessons.
In the post lesson discussion in Japan, LS group members try not to directly criticise the teacher but rather to find and emphasise the excellent points in the lesson. When an observer does want to raise issues about aspects of a research lesson, he or she will always try to use try use what, in Japan, we call the “I-message.” The subject of the I-message is never the teacher but the observer. So an observer will say for example, “I observed two students who seemed to lack concentration soon after after the lesson started. Did anyone else? Does anyone have a view about why?’ This focuses the issue on the learning and not the teaching and is less threatening to the teacher while still allowing the issue to be discussed and still allowing teaching to be improved.
In the symposium, two Kazakh speakers reported how their schools conduct lesson studies and how teachers improve learning and teaching themselves as a result. It was clear from the vibrant discussion in the symposium that Lesson Study is proving very popular in Kazakhstan and that teachers feel that it provides a strong framework for closely observing practice and the impact of practice on pupil learning, and that it does so in a way that promotes enthusiastic teacher learning and improvement in pupil learning in the schools of Kazakhstan.
Toshiya CHICHIBU
Senior Researcher
National Institute for Educational Policy Research of Japan (NIER)
1 January 2014
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