Week 6

Wondering: How can you incorporate a lesson study more often?

     These past two weeks the second grade team has been working hard with our lesson study. We developed a lesson about making predictions and having the students use evidence from the text or schema to develop a prediction, rather than a random guess. My co-teaching partner and I taught the first lesson and it went well. The students were engaged and the lesson was filled with great information for them to use. Going into the debriefing I never expected to change much of the lesson. An observer, noted that the lesson was great and was taught well, however, that the students seemed to already understand the concept of prediction. We ended up completely changing our lesson activities and only altered the objective. Our objective was to teach student how to find the evidence in any type of text or situation to make a predication. I never thought we could make such a change to our lesson from the first time we taught. When the second lesson was taught, it went extremely well. The class we were in was a more difficult group of personalities. The lesson planned well enough that the classroom management was under control.
      According to Tomilson and Imbeau, "it's important that both students and teachers understand the goals of a differentiated classroom and how a particular routine or procedure helps achieve those goals." Even though the students we have taught for the past two weeks for the lesson study were not our own, differentiation played a role. It was evident that the some students were not understanding the individual task. This is when the teacher came by and gave one-on-one help by reteaching the parts of the lesson the student didn't understand. I never thought that this lesson study would be so helpful.

I am still wondering: How can teachers use a form of lesson study to reflect on the daily lessons they teach?