Using Lesson Study for Teacher Professional Development for Moral Education: Project Structure, Goals, and Assumptions

• In Event: Lesson Study for Professional Development of Teachers to Integrate Moral Education Within Middle School History

Abstract

This talk provides the context of our work using Lesson Study in conjunction with domain theory (Smetana et al., 2014) for professional development of teacher leaders for moral education. This project extends a successful moral education collaboration that led the urban district to request that we provide professional development for district designated “teacher leaders” each representing one of 17 middle schools (Grades 6-8).

Our work was guided by two frameworks. First, lessons generated by the teachers employed assumptions of social cognitive domain theory to identify moral and social conventional issues within the regular history curriculum, and to structure classroom activities intended to generate growth in the moral and conventional domains (AUTHORS, 2014). Second, lesson construction and implementation employed the processes Lesson Study. Lesson study is a collaboration-based teacher professional development approach that originated in Japan (Lewis et al., 2006) and was used to shift the culture of Japanese teaching from didactic to student-centered in the 1980s. In Lesson Study, teachers collaboratively 1) set goals, 2) plan a lesson, 3) teach a lesson while being observed and student learning data collected, and 4) debrief about the student learning in the lesson. Lesson study continuously focuses teachers’ attention on student learning. It was the ideal context for generating the teachers’ growth and for investigating their competencies to construct and implement domain-based lessons for moral development.

Our professional development activities were divided into three major segments.

1. A two–day in-service provided basic information for integrating moral education within the history curriculum (AUTHORS, 2014). This included premises of domain theory, developmental changes in moral and conventional concepts in early adolescence, criteria for identifying lesson topics embedded within history, and basic information for engaging students in transactive discussion. The in-service introduced participants to Lesson Study: the primary vehicle for our work throughout the year.

2. Following the inservice, teachers met weekly with project staff in grade defined Lesson Study groups. This phase entailed construction and teaching of the Exploratory Lesson. Teachers collaboratively planned and individually taught a short lesson, and collected student-learning data to bring back to the following lesson study meeting. In this meeting teacher leaders identified critical take-away learning that provided the foundation for their planning for the upcoming research lesson.

3. In the third phase teachers constructed and taught two research lessons: collectively generated lessons taught by one teacher in the group while being observed by other members of the group. In the research lessons, teachers identified key research questions(s) and data collection point(s), and gathered student-learning data according to the plans. In research lesson debriefing, teachers shared the data and discussed student learning, and possible modification of the lesson to improve student learning in the future.

All activities including lesson implementation were video recorded and used by the teachers to inform their analysis of lesson successes, and limitations to be addressed in future lessons. The talks following this introductory presentation will detail the outcomes of our analyses of those video recordings, and the information obtained in year-end assessments.

Authors

• Larry P. Nucci, University of California

• Aki Murata, University of Florida