January 3rd (& 23rd) - Reading Group 11:45-1:15 Belk Pavilion 200
Lesson Study: Using Classroom Inquiry to Improve Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
(2011) by Bill Cerbin (138 pages)
Lesson study is a simple yet focused technique for studying learning in one aspect of a course. The lesson study technique originated among teachers in Japan, and has been adapted at the (the author directs the UW program). Lesson study is a powerful and efficient way for faculty to improve student learning.
Peter Felten will facilitate this group, and participants will be invited (but obligated) to develop a lesson study project in the spring.
Lunch will be available, so please RSVP, including any dietary restrictions, to Katie King (x 6449; kingcath@elon.edu). RSVP by December 14th so you can receive book before the holidays.
** Continues on January 23rd – when you RSVP you’ll be registered for both dates. **
From the introduction
Using Classroom Inquiry to Improve Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
“This volume offers guiding principles, theoretical underpinnings, fresh thinking, detailed examples, and, importantly, a window into the larger community that is now assembling itself around this important work. This is not only a book about lesson study but about teaching and learning more broadly. A deceptively simple process, Lesson Study opens a wide door to a generous set of understandings and experiences.
What Lesson Study adds to the mix is a powerful reminder that knowing what (and even how much) students learn is not enough; in order to improve educational outcomes, teachers need to understand more about how students learn. In this spirit, my favorite phrase in the volume is ‘cognitive empathy’ – a term to capture the importance of imagining how new ideas are experienced by novice learners. Doing so is pretty clearly an element of good teaching, but it is also a prodigious challenge; as experts in their field, faculty have often forgotten their own experience as one-time beginners, seeing their field’s complex concepts and ways of thinking as a given. Thus one needs not only an impulse to cognitive empathy but a process for testing and strengthening it—and that is one way of explaining the purpose of lesson study.”
Pat Hutchings
from the introduction to the book