Educational Services Division
Lesson Studies and Algebraic Thinking:
Opening Classroom Doors
In a profession where teachers often find themselves isolated behind the closed doors of their classrooms, a group of teachers in Santa Cruz county are opening their doors to each other in order to improve their practice. They come together, plan and learn from observing each other teach.
Before the school bell rings, a team of teachers gathers to make last minute improvements on a lesson they co-created. During this meeting, they discuss the concept of equivalency, how to use white boards for student responses, and the use of manipulatives in order to help students visualize mathematical concepts.
Following their meeting, they watch one teacher from the team teach their shared lesson. Their goal during the observation is to see if the lesson they created together produces the desired student learning result. After the lesson is taught, they regroup, discuss their observations of student work, and reflect upon what they saw.
They talk about which parts of the lesson seemed to be effective and which may need some adjustment. After deciding on which parts of the lesson to revise, another teacher from the group re-teaches the improved lesson with a different group of students in order to see if their reflective conversation resulted in improved student understanding of the concepts.
This team of teachers is part of a group of 20 teachers who gathered this fall from across the county and made the commitment to deepen their knowledge around Algebraic Thinking.
Before this school year began, these teachers participated in a series of professional development workshops focused on building mathematical thinking, which in turn supports the students understanding of algebraic concepts. During the first workshop, presenters Suzanne Damm and Sandy Devlin shared their expertise with the group by providing them with hands-on teaching and thinking strategies. These teaching strategies help students develop conceptual thinking above and beyond the thinking needed to answer the multiple choice questions required on so many current assessments.
The participating teachers were given an opportunity to take these strategies back to their classrooms and practice them with their own students. At the next professional development day in the series, teachers returned and shared what they had experienced in the classroom while practicing their new teaching strategies. Teachers reflected on their practice, heard from their peers, and learned other ways that they might improve their lessons.
The next step was to use their experiences to collaboratively plan a complete lesson together, which they could then observe being taught by one of their peers. They used the professional development model of Lesson Study, which originated in Japan. This continuous improvement model supports teachers as the experts, who learn from each other while others provide resources.
The Lesson Study model includes a cycle of procedures where teachers first STUDY the necessary content area curriculum and standards. Then, they collaboratively PLAN a lesson or task to teach. This planning includes anticipating student responses and determining what data will be collected to check for student understanding. Once the lesson is planned, one team member agrees to DO/teach the lesson while others observe either live or by video. Finally, the team reconvenes to REFLECT upon their observations and to analyze any student work in order to determine if the lesson was successful. The lesson may then be improved upon and revised for another teacher member of the team to try teaching again with other team members once more observing students.
The goal of the Lesson Study is improved student and teacher learning. Teachers learn by collaborating on the lesson, observing the learning environment as the lesson is taught, and reflecting on outcomes with their teacher peers.
This opportunity to open the classroom doors and share effective teaching practices is sure to result in enhanced student achievement in our schools.
Find out more about the “Teaching Algebraic Thinking” workshop series.
