Toward Abolitionist Teaching: Peer Mentoring in Lesson Study

• In Event: New Perspectives on Teacher Learning: Teachers as Facilitators of Peers' Professional Growth

Abstract

Objectives: Teachers, students, and their families across the globe face common challenges in schools due to COVID-19, but the pandemic also laid bare vast differences in access to digital resources, quality of health care, and exposure to risk factors. During this same year, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police brought issues of racial injustice to the surface for many in the US. Taken together, these events underscore the urgency for schools to be cornerstones of a more just and equitable society. To do so, teachers will need to develop capacity to teach in ways that are likely different than what they experienced as students themselves and how they have taught until now. This paper shares research on a form of professional development, lesson study (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), that is by its very nature democratic and led by teachers. This paper focuses on the practices that support peer-led generation of new, localized knowledge about teaching in groups of teachers engaged in lesson study for teaching mathematics.
Perspectives. Bettina Love has written that “schools function as spaces of dark suffering” (2019, p. 15). Lesson study allows teachers to drive their own learning, and to experiment in the company of their peers with new forms of instruction based on evidence from the classroom. Lesson study represents a departure from modal forms of professional development where teachers are given directives from experts or superiors. In their extended study of mathematical topics chosen by the teacher groups, teachers together design lessons, working as peers to generate new knowledge. This paper focuses on the affordances of the peer mentoring that proceeds in various phases of lesson study.
Methods: 70 teachers in a large Midwestern city participated in a modified form of lesson study. Teacher learning in this experience is measured using measures of social capital (Pil & Leana, 2009), mathematical knowledge for teaching (Hill et al., 2008) and textual analysis of data sources listed below from the lesson study. This paper focuses on the affordances of the peer mentoring that proceeded in various phases of lesson study.
Data sources: The data collected from one lesson study cycle include observers’ field notes from observations of the sessions, children’s work from a shared observed lesson, records of teacher participants’ planning work in small groups, and records of teacher participants’ mathematical problem solving work.
Results: Teachers participating in a modified form of lesson study expressed deep connection to other teacher participants and a desire to continue their own learning about teaching; worked to extend their mathematical knowledge in part by relying on the knowledge of peers; referred to changing classroom management for equitable outcomes; and increasingly drew upon artifacts of practice when appraising lessons.
Significance of the study: To pursue Love’s vision of “an abolitionist approach to educational freedom” (2019, p. 25), lesson study provides a structure for teachers to create “joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering” (p. 25).

Author

• Jennifer M. Lewis, Wayne State University