Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/458422
TRANSFORMING "FRAYED BACKPACKS" What is Lesson Study and how did it help u s r e p a i r o u r C o m m o n C o r e f r a y s a n d patch our wear? Here are our answers to these questions. What is Lesson Stu dy? Lesson Study is a process of professional development in which teachers work collaboratively on a series of "study lessons." Through a cycle of background research, planning, teaching and reflection — guided by a research question — teachers work to make their practice more intentional and their students' learning more effective. One teacher on the Lesson Study team will teach a co-constructed lesson while the other team members observe and collect specific data with the goal of reflecting on and revising the lesson for future teaching. O u r teachi ng c o nte xt Our urban elementary school is in San Francisco and has a population of approximately 480 students. The student body is 65 percent Latino, 15 percent white (non-Latino), 10 percent African American, 4 percent Pacific Islander/Asian, and 6 percent other groups. Almost half our students are English learners, and 68 percent of our children receive free or reduced-price school meals. We have 25 classroom teachers on staff. O u r qu estio n Like other educators today, the five teachers on our Lesson Study team considered how to implement the new CCSS in our classrooms. These standards shift the focus from teaching to learn to teach- ing to think, causing us to reflect on how best to help our students meet the demands of, for example, the speaking and listening standards of the Common Core that ask children to "prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations." We were aware of our students' challenges in "building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively." We understood that "language refinement plays a critical role in enhancing a person's cognitive maps and ability to think critically" and that it was, therefore, our responsibility as educators to provide all our students — particularly our historically underserved students of color — with the skills to refine cognition through language. We realized that as Lesson Study participants, we were engaging in exactly the kind of collaborative activ- ity that the CCSS are designed to prepare our students to participate in later in life. Consequently we began asking ourselves an important question, a question that has served to guide our Lesson Study research into implementing the Common Core speaking and listening standards ever since: How could we do right by our students and provide them with the requisite tools for participating in academic conversations with one another? Our answer Owning the need to "do right" by our children galvanized us. If we wanted our students to collaborate in a more intentional way, we thought, then perhaps we should, too. The Lesson Study process, therefore, became the answer to our question. For three years running, our Lesson Study team — composed of two kindergarten teachers and one second-grade, one third-grade, and one 4/5 split teacher — has been approaching the subject of collaborative conversations from various angles in order to close the gap that exists I K E O U R S T U D E N T S ' backpacks in late May, we enter the classroom on Fridays after school: frayed and a bit worn. Unlike those backpacks, though, our shine quickly returns. With a little coffee and a lot of camaraderie, the five teachers in our elementary school's teacher-driven Lesson Study team settle in for an afternoon of collaboration and reflection on the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Emerging a couple of hours later, we feel less like a weathered backpack and more like an appreciated professional prepared to focus on "teaching to think." L Lesson Study and the Common Core speaking and listening standards By Robert Sautter, Emily Law, Jake Harris, Viridiana Sanchez and Brett Fox United Educators of San Francisco Lesson Study Learning 46 www.cta.org