LIFT Project – Lesson Study in Future Teacher Education

Lesson Study Cycle

The Lesson Study (LS) process, with practicing or preservice teachers, may be described in the following way:

“In a lesson study, a group of teachers or a combined group of teachers and teacher educators/researchers work together, identifying the students’ difficulties on a given concept or issue, studying the related curriculum guidelines and research results, analyzing tasks, and planning what they consider as a suitable lesson to address the proposed concept or issue. This “research lesson” is taught by a member of the group to a class of students, whereas the others observe the lesson with a focus on student learning. The participants seek to verify to what extent this lesson achieves the sought objectives and what difficulties arise. On the basis of this analysis, they may revise the lesson and re-teach it to another class […] Given the focus and the nature of the process, lesson studies may be regarded as a small investigation of the participants carried out on their own professional practice.” (Ponte, 2017, p. 169)

Lesson Study is often graphically represented as a cycle:

These stages are chronological. Nevertheless, reflections during one stage might lead to revisiting a previous one. For example, a moment of the planning phase might lead to refinement of a part of the study phase or even the research question.

The team may decide to plan a modified version of the research lesson, mainly to better answer the research question.

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