What American Teachers Can Learn From Japan
"Traditional (U.S. teacher) professional development can be likened to a cooking show. Many people watch the show but few actually try the recipe. Even those who actually try it, often run into problems since they are working alone . . . Lesson Study (in Japan) is more like a cooking group that tries the recipe and then collaboratively thinks about how to modify and improve upon it."
"Lesson Study"
How To Improve Teacher Quality In America
A Journal
By Bill Jackson
There has been much talk recently about how to improve teacher quality in America, especially in the areas of mathematics and science where international studies show that we lag consistently behind many other industrialized nations. In the U.S., teachers initially learn how to teach through undergraduate and graduate courses in schools of education. In addition, during the undergraduate experience, a teacher may spend a few weeks or months in an actual classroom as a student teacher. After that, teachers are put in the classroom with the expectation that they are able to teach effectively. Any additional training they receive usually comes in the form of workshops led by outside "experts" but these opportunities are usually few and far between.
Countries with high achievement in mathematics like Japan, take a very different approach to professional training of teachers called Lesson Study ---- a form of professional learning where teachers collaboratively plan, teach, observe, discuss and reflect on actual classroom lessons. I became involved in Lesson Study in 1999 as an eighth grade classroom teacher and it literally transformed my teaching and knowledge of mathematics. (You can read more about this in Part One in my guest post "Singapore Math Demystified".) Today, many schools in the U.S. are