What Is Lesson Study?

Lesson Study is a form of long-term professional development in which teams of teachers systematically and collaboratively study and improve lessons as a means to develop better insight into how students learn best.

It is also a process that helps teachers develop habits of self-reflection and improvement through collaboration with their colleagues.

Lesson Study consists of a series of planned steps that take place over a number of months or longer.

This generally involves a group of teachers:

planning a lesson collaboratively
teaching the lesson in a classroom
collecting observation data of the lesson
reflecting upon, discussing and revising the lesson
re-teaching it

In addition, the Lesson Study team documents their efforts as well as the results of their efforts during the entire Lesson Study process.

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A Short History of Lesson Study

Lesson Study originated in Japan as a grassroots educational movement to implement child-centered teaching on a wide-scale basis. It is the most common form of teacher professional development in Japan and was “imported” to the United States by Makoto Yoshido as a subject for his dissertation in the early 1990’s.

Yoshido’s work so interested his advisor, James Stigler, that he established a team to analyze differences in classroom practice between the U.S. and Canada. Concurrently, educator Catherine Lewis became interested in Lesson Study and published the first scholarly article on Lesson Study in 1998.

In 1999, Stigler and colleague James Hiebert published The Teaching Gap; Yoshida completed his dissertation and launched the first collaboratively-guided lesson study group at Paterson School #2 in New Jersey. Since then, Lesson Study has spread to 2300 teachers in 335 schools in 32 states and continues to grow with every passing year.

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