Lesson Study as a Laboratory for Specifying and Enacting Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

• In Event: Poster Session 9
  In Poster Session: Understanding Lesson Study From Different Theoretical Perspectives (Part 1)

Abstract

Objectives: Educators love to love the notion of “culturally relevant pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and its variants (“culturally responsive teaching,” “culturally congruent instruction,” and the like). Teachers working in high-poverty schools for children of color often espouse its value and label what they do as “culturally relevant.” For decades now, “culturally relevant pedagogy” has been promoted as an effective approach to meeting the needs of black and brown children living in poverty. Yet knowing how to enact “culturally relevant teaching” eludes many teachers. Lesson study, with its extended collaboration, focus on student learning, shared lesson design, and in-person live observations of research lessons, can function as a laboratory for developing specifications and enactments of culturally relevant pedagogy.

Theoretical Framework: Lesson study can be a bridge between theory and practice, and is thus suited to the development of teaching practice that is informed by theoretical ideas (Author, 2015), such as culturally relevant pedagogy. The iterative cycle of curriculum study, lesson planning, lesson enactment, and reflection (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999) can function as a canvas for experimenting with complex ideas such as culturally relevant pedagogy, with the social and professional supports and critical colleagueship afforded by team members, accompanied by the discipline of searching for evidence of student learning.

Data: Records of practice from two years of lesson study for elementary and middle school mathematics classes were collected from three different lesson study groups in Detroit schools. These records include teachers’ lesson plans, facilitators’ field notes, videotapes of research lessons, teachers’ observation notes, transcriptions of interviews of participating teachers, administrators, and facilitators, and student work from multiple cycles of lesson study.

Methods: A research team of lesson study facilitators, researchers, and teachers from inside and outside the lesson study groups studied the data, noting instances where issues of potential cultural relevance appeared. Using an improvement science approach (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015; Lewis, 2015), the research team engaged the lesson study groups in exploring issues of culturally relevant teaching and pointed out openings where these issues came to the fore; the lesson study teams provided researchers with expansions and suggestions for where these practices might develop in their lesson study plans, research lessons, and reflections.

Results: The lesson study process provided four particular openings where overt work on culturally relevant teaching transpired: the articulation of shared definitions; the design of specific discourse moves and pedagogical structures; the habit of mind to visit issues of critical consciousness in reflections on research lessons, and the categorical attention to cultural relevance in lesson design.

Significance: Naming the structures in lesson study for enacting and appraising instruction for its cultural relevance enables teachers to carry out the kind of teaching they aspire to with children of color. Lacking such specification, teachers are likely to revert to default practices and drift from their commitment to advancing the achievement of black and brown children. Lesson study provides a platform for teachers to design culturally relevant instruction in the company of colleagues to try out innovative practices in a reflective, critically supportive professional forum over time.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Lewis, Wayne State University

• Jeffery Delshawn Robinson, Detroit Public Schools

• Lenuel Hernandez, Wayne State University