by OLS Community Manager
While the cherry blossom trees are still in bloom across many parts of Europe, allow yourself to be transported in this short blog post to Japan, where Jugyou Kenkyu, a teaching practice rooted in collaboration and steady improvement continues to bear fruit 140 years since its beginnings.
Known in English as Lesson Study, Jugyou Kenkyu is a form of professional development in which teachers, known as teacher-researchers, collaborate to plan, observe and refine lessons to improve student learning.
What goes on during the observation and later analysis of findings is not an evaluation of the teacher's performance, however. Instead, the observers focus stubbornly on how engaged the learners seem, their thought processes and their outcomes.
Based on the group’s analysis, improvements are made to the lesson plans as part of an iterative process of feedback loops and ‘quality circles’. A task in a textbook is therefore never the finished product or perfect ideal!
Your Teaching Context
Have you ever read about ideas like “Continuous Improvement” and thought, “It sounds great, but it wouldn’t work in my school”?
Unlike in Japan, where practices such as Jugyou Kenkyu are deeply embedded in the system, many teachers elsewhere work with limited time, support and opportunities for collaboration. As a result, teaching can feel like what Donald Freeman (1998) called an ‘egg-box profession’, where teachers work largely in isolation, learning through their own trial and error rather than through shared reflection.
Yet this reality also brings a certain strength. While we may not always have the conditions for systematic collaboration, we do have the freedom to respond to what happens in our classrooms. Many of the most important teaching decisions are made ‘in-the-moment’, shaped by our students’ engagement levels and needs. As Jim Scrivener (2012) suggests, effective teaching requires “an active moment-by-moment processing of the current situation and a flexible ever-changing reflection as to what might be the best thing to do next”.
Different Pathways to Success
It may well be true that Jugyou Kenkyu provides an excellent training ground for teachers. However, it may also be true that a system where such support does not exist, is not automatically a bad system.
While we may wish that we had stronger institutions of peer-observation, collaboration and continuous development, is it impossible to imagine some Japanese teachers wishing they had a bit more freedom to be creative or spontaneous in the classroom?
We have the freedom to be student-focussed, in the moments that they most need us. But to recognise when those moments are, our focus upon the engagement, the thought processes and outcomes of our learners must be just as stubborn as that of the teacher-researchers of Jugyou Kenkyu.
Help us understand your teaching context:
- Who do you teach?
- What subject matter?
- What materials do you have at your disposal? Do you adapt them?
- What kind of setting does the learning take place in? What access to technology is there?
Observation / Collaboration
- Is there a peer-observation system at your place of teaching?
- Can you describe what happens? How effective is it?
- Would you be interested in finding someone in this forum to collaborate with?
Reflection on the blogpost:
- What’s more important to a successful lesson, the quality of the materials or the flexibility and improvisational skills of the teacher?