Lesson Study is a process whereby teachers, as a team, collaborate and develop a lesson
that one of those people in the team volunteers to teach. And it's taught, it's observed by
the other people in the team, then the team comes back, has a discussion around it - what
worked, what didn't work, what they think might need to be changed. And then another
volunteer from that group re-teaches the same lesson with its adjustments, to a different
group of children, and then the observation and discussion is had again around that.
The team leaders were the first people to do the Lesson Study and be the person to teach the
lesson, and that way everybody felt it was okay. Lesson Study is a very non-judgmental
strategy to use. It's not about the teacher, because the lesson is developed as a team,
and it is a team effort. So it's around the strategy itself - it's not the teacher; it's
not individualised. We're not looking at the teacher, we're looking at the strategy, we're
looking at the things that are happening in the classrooms to improve student outcomes.
At first, the students are really scared because they've got other teachers coming in the classroom.
They feel really overwhelmed and think that all the teachers are there for them. So basically,
what we usually do before we do our Lesson Studies is scaffold the students and remind
them that Lesson Study is basically not to observe the students. It's basically us and
other teachers visiting the classroom to think of ways of how we can improve student learning.
Our aim today is to look at self-directed students, self-directed learning in stage three.
Like Jann said, it is SOL so it's self-organised learning environments, so it's very student directed.
So they've got a big question that they are researching and answering. They organise their own groups,
and at the end they present one fact that they've found and then reflect on their learning in the group.
As observers, we don't interfere with the natural process of the lesson.
We don't talk or carry on a sidebar conversation during the lesson.
We can circulate around the room when the children are engaged, but not when it's a teacher-and-class situation.
We stand at the back and the sides, and it's about the goals of the lesson,
it's not about Amanda's teaching or Amanda. It's about the goals of the lesson, what's happening
in the lesson and what we can see from there. And of course we're embedding all of those
things that we have been talking about and learning about in professional learning.
Why is SOLs important? Why are those skills important? I know you all came up with your own success criteria.
You've got them on your checklists. Hands up who can give me one example of something
that they put for their success criteria.
I think it went well. They love SOLs; they're very engaged with it.
You can see that they self-organise. I think they're just so engaged
with the process, and you can see that they're connecting the skills, they're connecting
the success criteria, and they're doing that in other subjects as well now. So it's nice
to see a class that can self-regulate their learning. It worked well and there wasn't
any behaviour problems - everybody was on task, and in the end they did produce some
good relevant information. Dalal, do you just want to give us a brief rundown on what's
going to happen today? Okay, so students in 56A and 56C have been undertaking learning
using the SOL model in order to develop their critical and creative abilities within the
ICT capability. We all came together after Amanda did her first Lesson Study, and we
realised that to change it for my lesson study, we would do a buddy class. So Amanda did her
SOL with her class; my class is a buddy class, so mine is half of 56A and half of 56C. What
we're going to do today is continue our SOL session that we worked on yesterday. You'll
all be presenting your information to the whole class, so make sure each one of you
has something to present, and you record and share your findings at the end. Okay? So you
can start your SOL session, and also don't forget to put up your Vocam and your websites,
please. You'll have 20 minutes, so keep an eye on the timer. You can move around the
room or sit on the floor wherever you like. You can start now. One of the things about
Lesson Study is that you teach, you change what needs to be changed, and then you re-teach;
and we've done that today. And you talked about the re-teach being how you changed it
up. Can you just refresh us on that one? Yes. So the re-teach of Amanda's lesson study was
Amanda conducted her SOL session with her class, whereas for my session we changed it
up with students from 56A and 56C. So we halved our class up roughly, and we called it the
buddy class, and that was the strategy that we adopted from the SOL program when we were
doing our program area. The reason why we did that is just to challenge the students.
We found that the kids, while they were doing it in our class, were always going in the
same groups. We thought let's see how the dynamics change if we buddy them up with different
students and challenge them. I believe the lesson went really well. I think our outcome
was achieved. All the kids were engaged. All of them were on task. All of them completed
everything that they needed to do in their success criteria. I really think that the
learning intention was really nailed, and if we really look at the learning intention,
which was to work collaboratively, locate, analyse, summarise and evaluate sources using
technology, it's that broad concept of learning intentions, so looking at learning intentions
I think was really great. Difficulties is mainly the pressure of it. We know that teachers
across the school are there to support us, but it is quite nerve-wracking thinking that
you're going to have a group of teachers coming in and viewing your lesson. However, the first
few times we did it we realised that it's constructive. No one's there to give you negative
feedback or say that you're not teaching well. It's really a great tool to become a more
proficient teacher. Lesson Study has allowed us to see how our professional learning and
the strategies that we're talking about and learning to improve student outcome, it allows
us to see how it's been embedded in classrooms. And because we do it K-6, and because we share
across stages now, it allows all of us to see how it's been embedded, but it also gives
us lots of ideas that we can actually take and modify to use in our own classrooms.