Building Professional Knowledge

Lesson study is not only a way to improve the teaching of those who participate in the process, it can be a way to improve the practice of teaching more generally. For example, in Japan teachers produce more than 4000 research papers annually based on their lesson study work. As researchers note

Together these writings provide an extensive repository of professional knowledge and ideas that teachers engaged in lesson study can learn and build from. Clearly, through this well developed system of publications, teachers from all corners of Japan can learn from each other’s lesson study activities. (Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004, p. 213)

Imagine what teaching would be like if you were able to refer to lesson studies on the topics you teach? Instead of starting from scratch—as most of us do—you could build on the work of others, adapt strategies and materials to your classes, and anticipate the kinds of problems and difficulties students might experience.

Lesson study should be a way to build and share professional knowledge about college teaching. Your lesson study could and should be available so that other teachers can learn from it and build upon it. Toward this end, we have established a way to make your work usable and accessible through the final report. In the report you will provide a detailed plan of the lesson, explain how it is intended to work, describe how students performed, discuss what you learned, and suggest how to improve the lesson. The report will be available online, making it possible to include lesson materials such as student handouts, instructor notes, video clips of the lesson and other related materials.   

Our aim is to start an online library and database of college lessons. Your Final Lesson Study Report will be one of the first contributions. Teachers will be able to access your lesson plan and materials and learn about how students responded to your lesson.   

Comments

[Kenneth Wilson]

There is a wonderful body of research on the misconceptions of college students in general that they bring to large freshman physics courses. The body of research comes from the Physics Education Research group of the University of Washington Physics Department in Seattle, led by Lillian McDermott. To learn more about their research see their website:

www.phys.washington.edu/groups/peg/

Try to get Lillian McDermott's Oersted Medal article from 2001 in the American Journal of Physics. Her group has prepared a remarkable course for teachers or minority students called Physics by Inquiry, which is unusually effective with teachers or with college students from outside of physics, as long as it is taught properly. A summer's experience with Physics by Inquiry as taught by members of McDermott's group is the best preparation known to us for teaching this course; much of the material for the course is contained in the written materials for Physics by Inquiry, which are used in a laboratory setting, with few or no lectures needed. Precise details about this course should be obtained directly from Professor McDermott or members of her group before trying to teach it. I know this from five years of experience organizing the scaling up the teaching of Physics by Inquiry in Ohio between 1991 and 1996: ultimately about five hundred middle school teachers were taught this course in a six weeks long intensive summer program, with six follow-up sessions of two days each during the following academic year.

An outside evaluator who was initially skeptical finally quit evaluating the effects of our program on teachers, because she told us that we had made our point that it caused profound change in most of our teachers beyond argument. Changes in the students taught by these teachers were harder to detect because the teachers we taught still had to struggle with unacceptable constraints on their teaching forced on them by most of their principals and by the present unbelievably stupid structure of most middle schools as organizations. If you want a short diatribe on why most middle schools and high schools do not and cannot work for the bulk of their students, because of the way that most of them are presently organized, let me know.

[Praxis I test]

Awesome! It is good article through which we can know how to teach our students and provide the good study material.