Q: How can lesson study work provide evidence of teaching effectiveness?
A: Lesson study is substantive professional work that should count in retention, promotion and tenure. Lesson study practitioners spend considerable time discussing goals and outcomes, collaborating with professional colleagues, participating in a peer review process, designing instructional activites, gathering evidence of student learning, making evidence-based improvements, and acting as reflective practitioners. Moreover, when they finish their final lesson study reports (read more), they contribute to a pedagogical knowledge base in their fields.
Lee Shulman writes,
a scholarship of teaching will entail a public account of some or all of the full act of teaching — vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis — in a manner susceptible to critical review by the teacher's professional peers, and amenable to productive employment in future work by members of that same community.
Lesson study is a window into the "full act of teaching" and thus provides richer information about teaching effectiveness than the disparate items typically included in teaching portfolios—namely, course syllabi, assignments, exams, grade distributions, student evaluations, teaching philosophies, etc. More significantly perhaps, lesson study shows how vision, design, enactment, outcomes, and analysis are integrated in actual classroom practice.
Lesson study practitioners know firsthand how lesson study work connects with teaching more generally. They know how careful instructional design and close observation of student learning can lead to improvement of instruction. However, how can they help outsiders, particularly those on retention, promotion and tenure committees, understand the work they have done?
The Teaching Improvement Profile (TIP) developed by Bill Cerbin provides an answer. This template is designed with brevity, coherence, and complexity in mind. It helps teachers tell their individual stories about lesson study.
- Download a Teaching Improvement Profile (.doc) to learn more.
Reference
Shulman, Lee. (1985). "Course anatomy: The dissection and analysis of knowledge through teaching," in Hutchings,Pat, (Ed.) (1998), The Course Portfolio: How Faculty Can Examine Their Teaching to Advance and Improve Student Learning. Washington D.C., AAHE
Bryan Kopp
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