Blake Peterson recently published a book chapter titled “Lesson Study in a Mathematics Methods Course: Overcoming Cultural Barriers.” Blake has answered a few questions about this chapter below:
Who were your co-authors on this chapter?
Dawn Teuscher from Brigham Young University and Thomas Ricks from Louisiana State University.
Who would you say is the target audience for this chapter?
Researchers who are trying to better understand how the Japanese professional development practice of Lesson Study can be adapted in the United States and teachers of secondary mathematics methods courses.
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this chapter?
Teachers in the United States often teach in isolation and several years ago I wondered what we were doing in our mathematics teacher preparation program at BYU to help teachers become better collaborators. Mathematics teachers are sometimes reluctant to talk with their peers about mathematics or student mathematical thinking for fear it might reveal weaknesses in their own mathematical understanding. We wanted to create a situation where they could become more comfortable having those kinds of conversations.
What are some of the key ideas in the chapter?
In order to help our preservice teachers in our methods/practicum class become better collaborators, we implemented a form of professional development used in Japan called Lesson Study. In Lesson Study, a group of teachers work together over an extended period of time (several weeks to several months) to prepare a single lesson. In the collaborative process, they have many conversations about mathematics, student mathematical thinking and the pedagogy necessary to help students gain understanding of the mathematics. The goal was to create a lesson that all members of the group felt comfortable enough with that anyone of them could teach it.
We found that there were many cultural barriers that got in the way of the authentic enactment of the lesson study process and we had to make adaptations to overcome those barriers. This chapter elaborates these barriers and the corresponding adaptations. For example, students resisted having the hard conversations to create a lesson that all would be comfortable teaching and would partially check out if they knew they weren’t the ones who would teach the lesson. There seemed to be a belief that the lesson was all about the teacher performance and not about student understanding of the mathematics. To overcome this barrier, we would not let the group know who was teaching the lesson until the moment before the lesson was to be taught. In this way, all members of the group had to “own” the lesson during the collaborative process. We found this adaptation led to better engagement by all group members throughout the process.
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from the chapter?
Having conversations about mathematics and student mathematical thinking with peer teachers is a great way to grow as a teacher and very beneficial for students. If teachers can allow themselves to be vulnerable and have conversations about mathematics that they may not understand, they will experience tremendous growth as a teacher.
Abstract:
In order to support the development of deeper mathematical understanding of preservice teachers, we have two main goals in our university mathematics methods course. They are for secondary preservice teachers to have rich conversations about (1) the mathematics of their lessons and (2) how students think about that mathematics. This paper describes our application of modified Japanese lesson study to meet these goals and how the US cultural views of teaching and mathematics were barriers to achieving those goals. Reflecting on 15 years of using lesson study to meet our methods course goals, we describe specific course revisions and changes necessary to overcome these cultural barriers and, thus, further improve the quality and quantity of preservice teacher candidates’ conversations about the mathematics of their lessons and how students think about that mathematics.