College Lesson Study Project

In the Spring of 2006, Bill Cerbin, professor of psychology and the Director, and Bryan Kopp, professor of English and the Associate Director of the College Lesson Study Project located at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, used the KEEP Toolkit to develop a procedure for documenting and publishing lesson studies by college instructors.

The College Lesson Study Project began in fall 2003 and grew to involve more than 150 instructors in 25 disciplines at 10 campuses in the University of Wisconsin System by the spring of 2006. Participants were located at the following UW institutions: UW Colleges (Barron, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Marathon, Marshfield, Rock, Sheboygan, Washington) , UW Green Bay, UW La Crosse, UW Madison, UW Milwaukee, UW Oshkosh, UW Platteville, UW River Falls, UW Stevens Point, and UW Stout. Instructors worked in small teams of 3-4 on their campuses to share and analyze their lesson plans in very specific ways.

What is Lesson Study? The Lesson Study process is a unique form of collaborative classroom inquiry, frequently practiced in Japanese elementary schools, in which a small team of instructors designs, teaches, studies and refines a single class lesson. A lesson study results in two scholarly products: 1) a carefully crafted, field-tested lesson and 2) a study of how the lesson works, and how it supports student learning and thinking.

Cerbin and Kopp modified this process to fit into the work of university and college faculty who were not used to sharing and documenting their teaching practices in such detail. However, Cerbin and Kopp helped UW instructors understand and adopt project goals for themselves. Project goals were to document each lesson study so:

• other teachers could adapt and use the research lesson in their classes
• other teachers could study how students learn from the lesson
• the work could be peer reviewed and improved.

Psychology Lesson Study

How did they document this form of inquiry? Prior to the introduction of the Toolkit, instructors documented their work in traditional text-based reports. Although teams videotaped the lessons, they found it was daunting to allow this video documentation to be accessed easily and used meaningfully by other instructors across different campuses and disciplines. They found that one of the most significant challenges for others was watching lengthy classroom videos without fully understanding the background, context, and points of view does not help other instructors learn in depth what makes effective teaching and learning.

In the spring of 2006, Cerbin and Kopp worked with the Knowledge Media Lab (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation over a two month period to create a unique KEEP Toolkit template to share with LSP instructors. They wanted a set of web-based pages that would allow lesson study teams to easily upload video, audio, and text files that had been collected over the course of an academic year. It also had to be easily understood by readers from other disciplines and campuses. The template therefore needed to be flexible, to account for different disciplines and materials, fairly detailed and layered, and extremely easy to use. "We first developed a stitched template, but decided it was too overly complicated and then designed one that uses a one page snapshot with many links to relevant materials and files."

The Lesson Study Final Report Template

"It has been very challenging to decide on a 'format' through which teachers depict a class lesson and explain how and why it supports student learning and thinking. There are difficult questions about what is most important to "show", how much material is enough, how much is too much," explained Cerbin. Over time, he and Kopp can and will modify their template to meet these needs.

The LSP Timeline

1. Work with teams in the College Lesson Study Project to learn how to use the KEEP Toolkit for their final reports.
2. Start to build a library of lesson studies and a searchable database of pedagogical knowledge related to the research lessons. See samplees of lesson studies in the project gallery.
3. Establish a peer review process for the lesson studies. This may include a "traditional" review process like that used in the MERLOT project (e.g., reviewers use a set of criteria and standards to evaluate a lesson study) and/or a review process based on "replication" of the studies (e.g., an instructor or team of instructors uses and studies the lesson in their own classes and then completes a report on how it worked in their setting).

Summary

Cerbin, a CASTL Scholar, created his first multimedia documentation of teaching and learning working with the KML in 1998. Building upon this effort, he now uses the KEEP Toolkit in his work with UW faculty who want to engage in lesson study to improve student learning. He and Kopp also have recommended the KEEP Toolkit to the directors of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Teaching Scholars Programs. In these programs, individual instructors engage themselves in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects during the year and could use the Toolkit to effectively document and share both the processes and outcomes of their work.