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Faculty Collaboration Yields Pedagogical Innovation at UW–La Crosse
William Cerbin first heard of “lesson study”—a collaborative approach to planning and studying course lessons that was developed in Japanese elementary schools—in 1999. Cerbin, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, says that learning about lesson study was akin to stumbling across “buried treasure.” The accounts he read “of how elementary school teachers engage in this systematic inquiry to design and study student learning in their classrooms” were intriguing enough, in fact, to prompt him to adapt lesson study for use at his own institution.
Cerbin launched the Lesson Study Project with support from the University of Wisconsin (UW) System Office of Professional and Instructional Development in 2003. Since then, the Lesson Study Project has reached nearly a quarter of the full-time faculty at UW–La Crosse through a total of twenty-three lesson study teams in fifteen disciplines. The project has also begun to involve faculty on other University of Wisconsin campuses.
Like many other faculty development programs, the Lesson Study Project brings faculty together to reflect upon their teaching; lesson study is unique, however, in its concentrated effort to “make student thinking visible” through the analysis of individual lessons. While it is still too early to measure the cumulative effect of the Lesson Study Project, William Cerbin—and many other faculty members who have participated in the project—believe that lesson study is already making valuable contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
What Is Lesson Study?
Lesson study is, in William Cerbin’s words, “a way that teachers can question, examine, and reflect on the entire teaching and learning process in the context of a single lesson.” It consists of six steps, beginning with the formation of a lesson study group and concluding with the revision and repetition of the lesson.
Lesson study teams are formed when interested professors—usually between three and six—come together to develop or improve a single lesson. Teams often choose to focus on particularly difficult or frequently misunderstood topics that are covered in introductory courses. For example, Cary Komoto, a geology professor at UW–Barron County, is working with his departmental colleagues on a lesson designed to address common misconceptions about global warming. Other teams have tackled teaching challenges that range from helping psychology students understand the “bystander effect” to weaning composition students off of the formulaic “five-paragraph essay” they learned in high school.
Once the lesson study team has been assembled, faculty articulate a clear set of goals for student learning. These goals identify the capacities and knowledge that are the desired outcomes of the lesson as well as the broader course outcomes to which the lesson contributes. A team that recently focused on an Introduction to Literature course thus identified a narrow goal for its lesson—“for students to apply the methodologies of literary studies to a single poem”—along with the broader aims of helping students “understand the methods and goals of literary studies as a discipline” and “approach literary texts using the methodologies of literary scholars.”
The actual planning of the lesson takes place after the goals have been defined. In this stage, faculty benefit both from the intentionality of the lesson study process and from differences between the lesson study approach and the way faculty typically plan lessons. Teachers participating in lesson study are able to plan collaboratively, which gives each faculty member the benefit of the others’ experiences. Moreover, lesson study requires faculty to approach the lesson with what Cerbin calls “cognitive empathy” in a process through which they anticipate “how students will perceive, interpret, and construe the subject matter and the lesson activities.”
The last stages of lesson study include teaching and analyzing the lesson—and, ultimately, repeating the entire cycle. The lesson itself is taught by one member of the team and observed by the others. The observers focus on how students respond to the instruction, how engaged they are with the lesson, and the extent to which the lesson achieves its goals for student learning. The team then reconvenes to analyze evidence of student learning, which may include notes from observers as well as information gleaned from student assignments and tests. The analysis leads to a discussion of how the lesson can be improved in the next cycle of lesson study, when the lesson will be taught and analyzed again.
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| The Lesson Study Project brings faculty together to reflect upon their teaching. |
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Lesson Study in Practice
Cerbin and his colleagues overcame a significant challenge when they created the Lesson Study Project: because lesson study was developed in Japan and designed for much younger students, they had to develop their own tools and materials and adapt the approach to higher education. Other challenges still remain: How can lesson study be made a “common practice” rather than just a one-time exercise? How can project organizers communicate the value of lesson study as scholarly work to those involved in tenure and promotion decisions? And how can they ensure that faculty themselves take full advantage of lesson study’s potential?
Despite such unresolved questions, lesson study has already had benefits for participating faculty. Psychology professor Carmen Wilson notes that “even at La Crosse, a comprehensive institution where our primary duty is teaching, we rarely systematically engage in conversations about teaching, what works, what does not, how to improve.” Wilson says that lesson study gave her “new ideas” for teaching and helped her become “more aware of and overt about specific learning objectives for specific classes.” Scott Cooper, a biology professor, similarly cites “sharing ideas with other instructors” and “having other instructors’ opinions on how an exercise worked in class” as valuable elements of lesson study. And the practice of lesson study, UW–Barron County Associate Professor of English Nancy Chick says, also usefully shifts faculty members’ attention away from “students’ shortcomings and failures” and toward areas where teaching needs to be improved.
These pedagogical benefits result from lesson study’s collaborative, hands-on approach to teaching and learning, says Bryan Kopp, an English professor who serves as associate director of the Lesson Study Project. “Rather than discussing overly abstract ‘teaching philosophies’ or learning outcomes or diffuse teaching goals such as ‘active learning,’ teachers talk about what they actually do on a daily basis and how they understand their practice,” Kopp says. “Most instructors have good intentions—they want their students to learn—but there are unfortunately few opportunities to share our theories about why students succeed or fail and to review teaching in a systematic, public way.”
Lesson study is now providing one such an opportunity for inquiry into student learning. Moreover, the model developed at UW–La Crosse has the potential to be transferred to other institutions. Faculty and administrators at any institution can take advantage of the many materials that William Cerbin and his colleagues have posted on the Lesson Study Project Web site. Cerbin recommends that campuses interested in lesson study “start small with interested instructors” and then “cultivate local expertise.” Stipends, meanwhile, can provide recognition of the value of faculty’s work. Finally, Cerbin advises campuses to “give it time.” “Even in our third year we are still discovering important features of the process,” he says.
This lesson study process represents one of the many efforts across the UW System to improve undergraduate education and ensure that all UW students achieve essential liberal education learning outcomes. UW–La Crosse and the UW System are partners in AAC&U’s campus-action and public advocacy campaign, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP). Together, AAC&U and the University of Wisconsin are working to promote innovative educational practices like lesson study and raise awareness of the benefits of liberal education.
More information about UW–La Crosse’s Lesson Study Project is available online.
The University of Wisconsin system, which includes UW–La Crosse, is a partner in AAC&U’s LEAP campaign. Wisconsin was the first pilot state in the campaign.
The UW System also sponsors The Currency of the Liberal Arts: Rethinking Liberal Education in Wisconsin an initiative that seeks to increase the awareness of the value of liberal arts education for UW System students and Wisconsin citizens.
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