LSUK is very pleased to post this guest blog from Dr John Mynott who leads the Chartered College Lesson Study Network
It is easy to be misled… a case for longer term Lesson Study considerations
John opened the door and found a palatial room with circular tables adorned with notepads and pens embossed with the logo of ‘the course’. Finally, after 12 years of teaching he was at ‘the course’ the one that promised to resolve all teaching and learning queries, order pedagogy and reform his teaching forever. He found his chair and settled down for 5 hours of inspirational learning which he knew would be the only course he would ever need.
Of course, ‘the course’ does not exist for teaching and learning and their interplay are complex, tacit and involve a seamlessly endless number of variables, meaning that John’s classroom on Tuesday will always – in some way – be different from Mona’s on Wednesday; even if they are teaching the same subject matter, using the same resources which they had planned and compiled together. So how can we improve teaching and learning? How can we develop? How can we know that the teacher development work we have invested in is having an impact? Well I do not think in the short term these questions can be answered, and they certainly can only be measured partially. Understanding if you have changed a person – and by this, I mean their teaching – you have to get them to want to change their behaviour and then observe what happens.
This brings me to Lesson Study. Recently, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2017) published its research into Lesson Study which was a large trial that found Lesson Study did not seem to have a significant impact on pupil attainment at the end of Key Stage 2. This to me was not surprising news as hypothetically teachers would have undertaken maybe 6 study lessons during their 2-year engagement (A more generous 24 lessons could have been undertaken). If you assume that a teacher in primary school may have 5 or 6 lessons a day for 190 days a year so approximately 950 lessons or 1900 lesson over 2 years, it is unsurprising that Lesson Study would have had any demonstrative impact on the outcomes of those pupils who would also have had 1900 earlier lessons in lower key stage 2. I am not concerned with the EEF study; I think it is interesting and more of these studies are needed. But actually for me as a Lesson Study researcher I do not think it was long-term enough or detailed enough to understand the potential for change within Lesson Study and it falls into the short-term impact trap of teacher development.
Let’s just revisit the number of lessons I have just mentioned. Say a teacher teaches for 25 years (optimistic by some accounts) but if they taught for 25 years they could teach approximately 21,375 lessons (this has been reduced to take into account 10% PPA) of which they may only be observed for less than 100 of these lessons. The rest of the time they are largely on their own, from the day they qualify to the day they retire. Teaching is not about the short-term it is about the 21,375 lessons the teacher is going to teach when no one is looking, when they are behaving as themselves, following their own instincts. If we want to change teaching we have to understand that it isn’t going to be coerced it is going to be cultured. I see Lesson Study as a model of a way to help teachers learn about themselves, and then through discussion move their own learning forward.
After five years of Lesson Study research, I am now starting to theorise how different cycles are impacted by the multitude of variables which exist in the average school and classroom. I am currently suggesting that there are four potential outcomes for Lesson Study groups in school.
Model of Potential Teacher Learning Outcomes in Lesson Study (Mynott, 2017)
My current research is looking at how we can work with teachers to reduce the likelihood of outcome 1 or 2 in this model so that teachers are learning and developing their own craft.
So, if Lesson Study, in the short term, is not having an impact how have I seen it change and develop teaching in the longer term. Well, for me Lesson Study has changed the way I think about Maths teaching. This change happened through the research I undertook with my teachers in 2013 and 2014. While the Lesson Studies we undertook ultimately were limited the learning we took from them has been formulated into our Maths teaching evolution since 2014.
So, what has changed; it started with a simple idea. We talked in detail about the questions we would use as our models (nothing breath-taking original) and this was based on our reading of Doig, Groves & Fujii (2011) where on reading about subtraction via regrouping (p192) had posed the question: Did we really have the depth of knowledge about which questions were most powerful for teaching our desired learning? In short, we did not and do not yet have the required depth of 8 years of mathematics to argue whether we prefer 13-9 or 12-9 as our first model of subtraction by regrouping in every single strand, lesson and stage of Mathematics, but the dissonance the Lesson Study work had done is it had posed the question that this is something we should be aspiring to. Three years later and we hold this idea key in the planning of all our Maths teaching. We think with increasing care about not just the content of what we want to teach but also how the model we use providing the depth of instruction that our children need.
So far, we have spent over 5 years, and countless hours to develop our understanding of Maths, but as I stated above our aspiration to have the clarity that Doig, Groves and Fujii (2011) expressed when discussing Japanese textbooks will only come from continued development and learning through Lesson Study work.
Instead of thinking about how we will impact data tomorrow, or next year when working with your teachers, think about the potential 21,375 lessons they are going to teach and the hundreds of children who will be taught. Teacher development and Lesson Study should no longer be about the short-term fix.
References
Doig, B., Groves, S. & Fujii, T. (2011) ‘The Critical Role of Task Development in Lesson Study’ in Hart, L., Alston, A & Murata, A. (eds.) Lesson Study Research and Practice in Mathematics EducationSpringer, London New York
EEF. (2017) Lesson Study: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary: November 2017 https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/lesson-study
Mynott, J. (2017) A Primary Head Teacher’s Exploration of Lesson Studyhttps://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/18330/14107916%20Mynott%20John%20Final%20Submission.pdf?sequence=1
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