Lesson Study as Action Research

To best answer How do you solve teaching problems with action research? we need to look at using Lesson Study as our form of action research.

What is Action Research? What is Lesson Study?

There is some value to the traditional American version of "Action Research" as a methodology that grew from Kurt Lewin's original thoughts, and has been expanded by many others, and is the focus of the AI derived-article. It has a democratic focus, and fits with traditional research in having a specific research question.

But, I believe that for teaching improvement, the Japanese form of action research, generally called Lesson Study is usually more effective. This is because:

1. It involves a broader group working together and not just an individual.
2. It looks at the lesson as a whole, instead of just focusing in on one "research question".
3. It encourages sharing the results of the research for other teachers to gain value from it.

Further, Lesson Study has its philosophical roots in Japanese industry continual improvement processes, which are much more geared to practical and holistic research to have continual improvement, compared to U.S. research which tends to focus on knowledge discovery.

Why use Lesson Study in Mentoring?

The use of Lesson Study as a form of action research in mentoring can be immensely valuable. First, it puts all the teachers on a more equal footing. The "mentor" will tend to be a coordinator, but doesn't have more authority. Further the "mentee" will be doing the demonstration lesson for the other members, but again, they do not have more or less authority. And all the participant teachers are focused on how to improve the lesson, and are not looking at any individual person.

By focusing on the improvement of the lesson, and not the teacher, this helps make the research more "objective", and have less of the emotional pain that can often come with traditional evaluation. Also, this type of group dynamic often allows other teachers to share their challenges, and by each teacher being a bit more vulnerable with each other, it tends to build much better cohesion and trust.

How to Plan and Conduct Lesson Studies?

Similar to how contemporary "action research" has four steps: plan, act, observe, and reflect; Lesson Study has four similar steps:

1. Study and Plan
2. Teach, Observe, and Debrief
3. Revise and Reteach
4. Reflect and Report

During the Study and Plan phase, the whole group of teachers who are working on the lesson study will do a literature review and do other research to find what is likely to work well for the lesson. Then they work together to help plan the lesson, with the person who would usually be considered the "mentee" being the one who will ultimately teach this lesson.

During the Teach, Observe, and Debrief stage, the "mentee" will teach the lesson, while the others observe. While this can be done with a recording, it is often better to be done real-time so a fuller picture can be seen, and students can be interviewed afterwards. The debrief process then gives a way of right afterwards talking about things while it is fresh in everyone's minds.

How to Share and Use Lesson Study Results?

The next two stages of Lesson Study are critical. In order to get the most value from the lesson study, the team needs to work to revise the original lesson, and then the lesson needs to get retaught to see how it works after the revision. The reteaching may be done by the original "mentee" or by someone else in the group with their class. Neither is perfect for determining how well the revisions worked, because if it is the same class, then they will be getting the content for a second time, and if is a different class then it will be different students who might inherently respond differently. But, with these unavoidable issues aside, it still has great value to see how the revised lesson worked compared to the original.

Depending upon how much better the lesson appeared to work (or not), and the resources of the teachers to do more lesson study, this process can be done again, until the lesson is fairly well honed. At this point, it should be shared, as that is also a critical part of the lesson study methodology.

Here’s what else to consider

While we may use the words "American" to describe what is usually called "Action Research" and "Japanese" to describe what is usually called "Lesson Study", it is important to not conflate the country a methodology started in with where the methodology can be successfully applied. It is probably more valuable to consider the philosophical roots of the two "action research" has more of its roots in scientific research's quest to find out "why" things are happening. While "lesson study" comes more from the engineering research quest to find out "how" to do something best. Both questions have value, and their answers overlap, but in my experience, working first on Lesson Study's focus on how to do something, naturally leads to a better understanding of why it works, while focusing on why something works first, doesn't always lead to using that knowledge to change how it works.