IME4512 Lesson Study in Primary Mathematics: Implementation

So far two schools have started the lesson study process. The team at North Vista Primary School has met to discuss the research theme and their initial plan for the research lesson. They will now go into the lesson planning process. Their research theme is along the line of children developing conceptual understanding by having their voices respected.

The team from Haig Girls' Primary School met to settle their research theme. They are working on developing students' critical thinking through cooperation and collaboration. They have also started to work on their lesson plans which will be for lessons on decimals (primary five).

Teams are encouraged to read the blog about setting research theme. See below.

Announcements

Please see the blog on WALS 2009 for information on proceedings of WALS2008.

NCTM 2009 Annual Meeting & Exposition

This is an annual conference for US teachers. Lots of professional development opportunities and a chance to look at teaching materials and manipulatives at the Exposition. Next year it will be at San Diago, California (www.nctm.org/meetings) 21-24 April 2010.

There were 828 sessions in all! Plenty to choose from. There were some on lesson study in mathematics too. Akihiko Takahashi did one on What We Learn Through Lesson Study: Ideas to Design Lessons for All. I went to the lecture by Deborah Ball and she proposed this idea on teachers' horizon knowledge and how it can be developed. I suppose lesson study can help teachers develop this knowledge which essentially is knowledge that allows them to understand where the mathematics their students learn will lead them to.

Jane Gorman presented a session on Starting Lesson Study at Your School.

I went to the National Research Council Report on Early Mathematics (Doug Clements, Karen Fuson, Sybilla Beckman & Herbert Ginsburg) to get some ideas as I will be working more and more with the kindergartens. In the evening I went to a session that got us solving primary school problems - quite fun if you like solving mathematics problems. I was presenting on the second day - two presentations - so I doubt I will have a chance to attend any sessions.

Other than Takahashi, the other people from the APEC Lesson Study group who were there were Patsy Wang, Lim Chap Sam, Makoto Yoshida and myself.

Lesson Study P3 Mathematics Teachers at PEPS

I have formed a lesson study team with a group of PEPS primary three teachers. We met for an hour on Tuesday. I tried to bring the team through the process of developing a lesson plan for research lesson. We talked about learning how to help low-achieving students develop into competent and independent problems solvers who can handle a variety of word problems with less scaffolding and guidance. In particular, in this research lesson, the team wants to explore the use of making-sense strategy (in particular with the help of pictorial representations and diagrams including but not limited to the model method), to find out how to assess students accurately during a lesson on word problems, and to see if students learn to do division better using an alternate strategy instead of the long division method.

The team leader doing such as session will request the team members to think of students' difficulties and use that to focus what the team has as it learning goals for the lesson-study cycle.

In this case, we have selected a stand-alone lesson which can happen after students have learnt a variety of operations - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Lesson Study at Redesigning Pedagogy Conference 2009 at NIE

This June, we will have the Redesigning Pedagogy Conference at the NIE. Kiyomi Akita (Tokyo University) told me that she will be at the conference to be part of a symposium put together by Christine Lee (CTL/NIE). Don't miss this opportunity to hear more about lesson study if you are attending the conference.

Look out for Deborah Ball's (University of Michigan) keynote lecture a sit give us some ideas about teacher capacity. Deborah Ball is a mathematics educators so her examples are likely to be all mathematics. http://conference.nie.edu.sg/2009/info/keynote-speaker.php

WALS International Conference 2009 8 - 10 December

WALS2008 Electronic Proceedings is now available at http://www.ied.edu.hk/wals/conference08/post1.htm#parallel1

I am glad to announce that The World Association of Lesson Studies International Conference 2009 will be held from 8 to 10 December 2009 in Hong Kong. This year, the theme is “Collaborative Knowledge Creation through Lesson and Learning Study”. The conference features keynote speeches, presentations by teachers and researchers from different countries, school visits etc.

More information of the program will be uploaded onto our website at http://www.worldals.org/

Should you have any questions, please contact our conference secretary, Miss Anna SETO at (852) 2948 8052 or email her at amfseto@ied.edu.hk .

Please bring this message to your friends and colleagues too. We look forward to seeing you at WALS 09!

Warmest regards,

KO Po-yuk, Ph.D.

Chairperson of the Conference Organizing Committee

Crafting Research Theme

Lesson Study is a professional development process and involves teachers collaboratively investigating their own practice to become more effective.

Such investigation involves planning, teaching, observing, critiquing and revising a small number of lessons. These lessons are called ‘study lessons’ or ‘research lessons’. It is in these lessons that teachers study, research and investigate teaching and learning.

To provide direction and focus, an over-arching goal and the related research questions should be set right in the beginning.

The first step in the lesson study process is to formulate this over-arching goal, sometimes referred to as research theme, and the related research questions.

These are some drafts of research theme articulated by the participants of the lesson study course. The research themes are broad and long-term in nature. And they are linked to the vision of the department, school and Ministry of Education.

The research theme can be adopted by lesson study teams in different grade levels and for different mathematics lessons on various topics.

The research theme is broad to provide a wider range of learning experiences. The research questions, based on the research theme, can be made more specific.

For the research theme selected, what are the ideal characteristics of the students? What are the actual characteristics of the students? Hence, what is the gap between the two? How do we close the gaps? These are the questions that the subsequent stages of the lesson-study process aim to provide answers to.