Understanding the Role of Lesson Study in K-12 Mathematics and Science Teacher Education

This conference will shed light on how mathematics and science teacher educators are currently using lesson study to prepare pre-service teachers. The project will improve teacher educators' understanding of how lesson study can be optimized to teach pre-service teachers which will help bring this technique to the future teachers in their programs.

Full Description

This conference will shed light on how mathematics and science teacher educators are currently using lesson study to prepare pre-service teachers. Lesson study is a structured process for teachers to study content and curriculum, carefully plan lessons to test a researchable question about student learning, teach the lesson in front of other professionals who help gather data, and use that data to evaluate the efficacy of the instruction for the students. With its focus on researching the connection between lesson enactment and student learning, lesson study contains structures for connecting practice-based teacher education to schools and classrooms. By evaluating the efficacy of the instruction, the outcomes, positive or negative, can be applied to other relevant instruction. The use of lesson study in college classes for pre-service teachers is relatively new in the United States, but it is becoming more popular. Because lesson study has been used primarily for in-service professional development of teachers, little is known about how it can be optimally employed for pre-service teacher education. This project will improve teacher educators' understanding of how lesson study can be optimized to teach pre-service teachers which will help bring this technique to the future teachers in their programs. When pre-service teachers are better prepared, high quality mathematics and science instruction may be expanded to more schools, giving more K-12 students improved opportunities to learn these subjects.

This project will support twenty-four mathematics and science teacher educators to collaborate in identifying their pedagogical goals for using lesson study and the enabling and constraining factors for its implementation that they perceive. Given that universities and schools have variance in their structures and focus, teacher educators will identify any modifications they have made to the lesson study process considering their context. By collaboratively identifying pedagogical goals, enabling and constraining implementation factors, and evidence-based adjustments to the lesson study process, this project will clarify the lesson study practices of the participants. The project will yield an edited book for other teacher educators to deploy lesson study in their teacher education programs, building from what is currently known and setting a trajectory for future pre-service teacher lesson study and research. Additionally, the project will establish a baseline network of teacher educators using lesson study within teacher education that can be built upon in the future.

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