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Detroit School Reform in Comparative Contexts: Community Action Overcoming Policy Barriers Edward St. John
Lesson Study has been actively introduced from Japan to various parts of the world, starting with the US. Such introduction is strongly connected with a focus on mathematics education, and there is a strong misconception that Lesson Study is only for mathematics or science. Introduction is usually done at the department or form level, but some question its sustainability in schools.
This book comprehensively explores the idea of Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) and suggests that reform of the culture of the school is needed in order to change learning levels among children, teachers and even parents. In order for this to happen, changing the ways of management and leadership are also objectives of LSLC, as are practices at the classroom level. The book argues that LSLC is a comprehensive vision and framework of school reform and needs to be taken up in a holistic way across disciplines. Chapters include how to:
• create time
• build the team
• promote reform
• reform daily lessons
• conduct a research lesson
• discuss observed lessons
• sustain school reform based on LSLC.
Strong interest in LSLC is already prevalent in Asian countries like Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore and is now being more widely adopted in the west.This book will be of great interest to those involved in education policy and reform, and practitioners of education at all levels.
Eisuke Saito is an assistant professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Masatsugu Murase is an educational consultant with the Azabu Institute of Education. Prior to that, he was a lecturer and associate professor at Shinshu University, Japan.
Atsushi Tsukui is a researcher at the International Development Center of Japan. He has also worked in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines.
John Yeo is a lecturer in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
LESSON STUDY FOR LEARNING COMMUNITY
A guide to sustainable school reform
Eisuke Saito, Masatsugu Murase, Atsushi Tsukui and John Yeo
First published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
The right of Eisuke Saito, Masatsugu Murase, Atsushi Tsukui and John Yeo to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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FOREWORD
I am deeply honoured to be invited to write a foreword to the first book written in the English Language on Lesson Study for Learning Community: A guide to sustainable school reform co-authored by Eisuke Saito, Masatsugu Murase, Atsushi Tsukui and John Yeo. I know each of these authors personally and have observed their interactions with schools, teachers and students in the contexts of lesson study in Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore. All of them are driven by a passion to bring about deep lasting change in schools, teachers, students and the community through Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC). They spent inordinate amounts of time observing research lessons and learning together with teachers on how students in these classrooms learn or are not learning in their search for ways on how to bring about quality learning in classrooms.
The authors are also driven by their compassion and care for the children in schools, paying careful attention to those who are marginalised and often not noticed in the crowdedness observed in schools and classrooms as school and class sizes are usually large in Asian countries. Their skilful use of the videocamera brings these ‘forgotten’ children to the fore to be noticed by their teachers during post research lesson discussions. This book is the product of the collective wisdom among the authors derived from many hours of observations, reflection and dialogue among and between each of them. It is written with the intent of sharing this collective wisdom with schools and teachers who intend to embark on the journey of LSLC. The book provides the philosophy behind LSLC as well as practical tips for observing research lessons and discussing research lessons. The authors have shared ways of creating time for teachers as the lack of time to be engaged in lesson study is an often heard cry from teachers. The authors have also tackled pertinent questions often raised by teachers, such as how to build teacher teams beyond subject boundaries, how to observe and discuss research lessons, how to bring about reforms in the daily practice of teachers and how to work
towards sustainability of LSLC in a school highlighting the important role of school leadership.
I also have the privilege of knowing Professor Manabu Sato whose vision and ideas behind this movement of Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) have fired the spirit of many educators in Japan and beyond the shores of Japan to China, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. I followed Professor Sato to schools, to the first pilot school in LSLC, Hamanogo Elementary School in 2004 when I was first exposed to Lesson Study and its variation in the form of LSLC and to other schools in Japan in 2011. What is Professor Sato’s vision for LSLC? What are the ideas that form the substance of the book co-authored by Eisuke Saito and his colleagues? The LSLC movement embodied in this book has brought us to reconsider once again what the purpose and meaning of education is as well as the purpose of schooling. It has made us re-examine our assumptions about how classrooms should be like as a collaborative community, how we view students and how they learn, how we observe lessons which are often done with an evaluative stance, how we discuss research lessons not as feedback but as a way of learning together and understanding our students better, how we view teachers not as teaching professionals but as learning professionals, how we view parents not as outsiders to the educative experiences we have designed for their children but as partners in their learning. LSLC is about learning communities at so many levels – teacher communities, student communities, parent communities and the interfaces between and among them. And the heart of these communities is dialogue and of developing a listening relationship within and among these communities.
I have asked Professor Sato why in his model of LSLC, joint planning of lessons among teachers do not occur and the planning is often done informally. He was concerned about the power relations among teacher teams comprising novice teachers and experienced teachers. Whose ideas would finally prevail in the enactment of the research lessons? This issue will be an ongoing debate among lesson study advocates as well as in teachers in schools. Similarly the issue of whether to form lesson study teams by subjects or levels will continue to be an ongoing debate. Should we not allow teacher teams to decide for themselves how they want to form their own teams or whether to engage in joint planning or to discuss their lessons informally?
The implementation of LSLC in any school is fraught with challenges. It is never easy to go against the tide of organisational as well as social routines that are deeply embedded in any school culture. Making classrooms a public space and having each teacher open one lesson to others resulting in about 80 research lessons for a large school in one school year is mind-boggling for many unaccustomed to making their classrooms public. Moving from teaching as telling to listening to students is another. It involves a mindset change and a belief in the philosophy behind LSLC. In one dialogue I had with Professor Sato, he shared that it would take about five to seven years for a shift in a school culture for LSLC to take root and bear fruits. For those reading this book and intending to initiate LSLC in your school, do not expect instant results within one to two years but persist in bringing into action the
vision and spirit behind LSLC. It is a call to move beyond the procedural aspects of observation and discussion to deep dialogue and redesign that will really bring about lasting impact on the learning of the students.
Christine
Kim-Eng Lee
President, World Association of Lesson Studies (WALS), 2011–2014 Head, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Academic Group, National Institute of Education Nanyang Technological University
PREFACE
Analysing national curricula of the advanced countries, I depict four main agenda items of school reform and three main features of educational practices of the twenty-first century. The society of the twenty-first century requires school education to correspond to: (1) the knowledge-based society; (2) multi-cultural education; (3) risk society and disparity society; and (4) citizenship education. School education in the twenty-first century is characterised by changes (1) from a programme-oriented curriculum to a project-oriented one, in other words, a thinking curriculum; (2) from lecture style teaching and isolated individual learning to learner-centered teaching and collaborative learning; (3) from a teaching profession to a learning profession. In addition, the curriculum of the twenty-first century is composed of four main cultural areas of language, scientific inquiry, art and citizenship. These new features and modes of education are summarised as the pursuit of both ‘quality and equality’.
Schools of the twenty-first century should be ‘learning community’ where students learn together, teachers learn together for professional development, and even parents learn together through participation in school reform. This definition corresponds to the public mission of realising the human right of learning for all children.
This idea, which I proposed about 20 years ago, has deeply captured teachers in Japan, and then, the grassroots school reform movement has rapidly spread nationwide. Today, about 1,500 elementary schools, 2,000 junior secondary schools and 300 senior secondary schools are attempting to reform themselves from within, according to this idea, and forming a grassroots network. About 300 pilot schools are active as leading agents for such innovation. They present more than 1000 open conferences per year for neighbouring teachers.
The proposal of ‘lesson study for learning community’ is not a technical approach but a set of three integrated components of a vision, philosophies and
Preface activity systems. It delegates three philosophies: public philosophy, which demands teachers open their classrooms; democratic philosophy, which introduces ‘a way of associated living’ (John Dewey) for all the members to be protagonists of the school; and philosophy of excellence for doing their best both in teaching and learning. In addition, the activity systems of ‘lesson study for learning community’ have three constituents: collaborative learning in the classroom, collegiality in the staff room through promoting lesson study, and learning participation by parents. This idea has deeply captured teachers. Miraculous success at the ‘hard schools’, which ‘at risk’ children in poverty attend, has fired democratic professionalism of teachers.
During the past 15 years, the grassroots movement has spread its wings to Asian countries, especially Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam. In all of these countries, as well as in Japan, the movement is recognised as the most powerful school reform for innovation in Asian countries in correspondence to the twenty-first century.
The authors of this book are all thoughtful educators who have been involved in enhancing the lesson study at the schools of learning community. All the chapters are keystones for establishing deliberative learning community within schools. I am sure that this guidebook will be a strong vehicle for wiring a network for reflective collaboration among democratic teachers by border crossing beyond nations.
Manabu Sato, Ph.D. Professor, Gakushuin University Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This small book is a product of interactions and collaborations among various people. As discussed in the upcoming chapters, all of the authors are indebted to Manabu Sato, advocate and pioneer of LSLC, for his dedication for practitioners and for academic works that led us to working on LSLC, and for providing an introduction to this book. We also wish to thank Christine Lee for her support and for providing a foreword to this book. All of the authors likewise extend their gratitude to Masaaki Sato not only for his expertise and insight on LSLC but also for his encouragement in writing this book.
We also sincerely thank the collaborating teachers, teacher educators, and researchers: Christina Ratnam, Lucy Fernandez, Fang Yanping, Ng Siew Ling Connie and Julie Tan from the National Institute of Education, Singapore, as well as our former colleagues, Fong Lay Lean, Elaine Gonda Maddatu, Deirdre Lim and Sharifa Syed Haron; Nguyen Van Khoi, Phan The Si,Vu Tri Ngu, and Ha Huy Giap from Bac Giang Province, as well as Vu Thi Son from Hanoi National University of Education; and Sumar Hendayana, Harun Imansyah, Tatang Suratno, Ibrohim, Ridwan Joharmawan, and Yosaphat Sumardi from Indonesia. Further, we would like to acknowledge the valuable contribution of Naomi Takasawa, Ryo Suzuki, and Isamu Kuboki in working with the participating Indonesian and Vietnamese teachers. Matthew Atencio, from California State University, East Bay, deserves our special thanks as well for his conceptual collaboration and contribution to the development of studies on LSLC.
Moreover, we wish to acknowledge the support given by Pauline Goh, whose comments on the chapters of the book helped improve the quality of the outcome. We also especially acknowledge Dyah Intan, Eka Koesma, Pitriawati, Siti Mahrifah, Nguyen Ngoc Thu ‘Aki’, Mikiko Tsuboi, Tran Hieu Thuy, Vu Mai Giang, Tong Thi My Lien, and Nguyen Thu Hang. On behalf of all the authors, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Khong Thi Diem Hang for her great support
Acknowledgements
and indispensable friendship to all of us. Ms Hang tirelessly accomplished daily coordination work with the Vietnamese teachers as well as commented on the manuscripts, and we would like to express our deepest appreciation for her devotion to work and to educational development and justice in Vietnam. Further, as a personal acknowledgement on my part, I would like to thank Shinichi Ashikawa, a philosopher in the wilderness, for his encouragement and teaching, which spiritually guided my commitment to LSLC.
This book is an outcome of two research funds: one by the National Institute of Education, Singapore (SUG 25/12 ES, Theoretical and Case Studies on Lesson Study for Learning Community), and the other by the International Development Center of Japan (twenty-first Century Fund, Lesson Study in ASEAN countries for the twenty-first century).
Eisuke Saito January 2014
1 WHAT IS LESSON STUDY FOR LEARNING COMMUNITY (LSLC)?
Lesson Study for Learning Community (LSLC) had a humble beginning in a single man’s vision to defend public school against a quick succession of top-down school reforms across Japan (Sato, 2008). Professor Manabu Sato believed firmly in the urgent need to revitalise education and started a grass-root initiative against the hegemony of neoliberal educational policies in the early 1980s that eventually led to the creation of learning communities among educators. Anchored in the vision that the school must be made of communities of learners at all levels with every other agenda organised around this and a doctrine that brings learning to the fore, LSLC promotes an environment where children learn together, teachers are respected as professionals modelling learning, and parents within the larger community come together and participate in the restoration of education. Such a learning community requires collaborative learning in all classrooms and encourages collegiality in the staffrooms with partnership among teachers being a critical component of success.
This book captures the experience and the unrelenting efforts of those pioneers who have successfully proven that LSLC can be an excellent vehicle to transform schools. This book explicates comprehensively the way LSLC restores the meaning of education in schools by systematically building the learning capacities of students, teachers, administrators, and even parents and other stakeholders. Such a transformation may sound too good to be true but the progress of reform in more than 3,000 Japanese schools (Sato, 2012), in addition to schools in China, Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam today, is testimony that it is possible. These schools have gradually moved from merely imparting skills and content to being active communities that live out the experience of true learning. In a keynote presentation in 2008, Professor Sato exclaimed, ‘the school is a miracle place where every child and every teacher can find his/her best way of learning’ (Sato, 2008).
Why LSLC?
International attention on lesson study
Effective professional learning is a long-term commitment and it is best conducted in a school community that promotes learning for all. Lesson study as an approach to teacher professional development emphasises both these elements: long-term practice and an implicit belief in the efficacy of learning. It therefore resonates with the emerging consensus that programmes should be based on the understanding that professional development is continuing, active, social and related to practice (Webster-Wright, 2009). Darling-Hammond (1997) has pointed out that professional development linked to student learning and curricular reform must be deeply embedded in the daily life of schools. This requires an examination of the teachers’ practices on a daily basis. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2001) reported that communities supporting inquiry would develop their own histories, and in a certain sense, their own culture in which teachers would share discourses, experiences and a set of procedures to lend structure to their shared experiences.
In order to develop such a community or culture, it is increasingly important for teachers to mutually observe and jointly reflect on practices at the classroom level. This is because teachers tend to obtain most of their ideas through actual practice – both their own and their colleagues’ (Barth, 1990; Joyce and Showers, 2002; Grierson and Gallagher, 2009). Further, observations and reflections on teaching practices, if appropriately performed, would help teachers to jointly pose questions regarding the problems they face, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the work of others to develop generative frameworks and attempt to make visible most of what is taken for granted about teaching and learning (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2001).
In 1999 Stigler and Hiebert made a phenomenal international impact on educators, especially in the US, with the publication of their book, TheTeaching Gap.Their findings showed how LS helped to enhance teachers’ learning and provided a possible clue to understanding the substantial gap between the US and the Japanese mathematics achievement scores in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study (TIMSS). They claimed that despite the introduction of group work and the apparent belief among American teachers that they had adopted a social constructivist pedagogical approach, in reality few changes were noted in the style of children’s learning (Hiebert and Stigler, 2000). In addition, they found few changes in teachers’ goals toward deeper mathematical understanding (Hiebert and Stigler, 2000). Educators and policy makers thought that perhaps LS might be the key to explaining this disparity and useful to the design of curriculum reform in schools (Council for Basic Education, 2000; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2001; Lewis, 2002). This was during a period when national education in the US was in crisis with many pressing issues needing to be addressed. LS began to make inroads into teacher education programmes and serious attention was paid to testing it on an academic level.
Under these circumstances and in combination with the call for professional development that is more school-based and grounded in daily realities, scholars introduced lesson study as a Japanese professional development method, denouncing conventional one-time professional development activities and emphasising the importance of a sustained and practical approach (Lewis and Tsuchida, 1998; Stigler and Hiebert, 1999).
Lesson study is described as a process consisting of the following steps: (1) collaboratively planning the study lesson; (2) implementing the study lesson; (3) discussing the study lesson; (4) revising the lesson plan (optional); (5) teaching the revised version of the lesson (optional); and (6) sharing thoughts about the revised version of the lesson (Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004). In the US and other developed countries, the development of knowledge in teachers is usually taken as the major reason for the introduction of LS and there is a tendency for small groups of teachers to start up LS (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; WangIverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007) but not necessarily to involve the entire school in the process (Saito, 2012). Joint planning has been richly discussed in US LS literature but not very much has been said about how to capture children and their learning (Saito, 2012). However, since the 1980s, educational environments in the US have become increasingly challenging and troublesome. In fact, such problems had actually necessitated the emergence of LS in Japan too. We will now move on to discuss these problems that have captured the attention of educators around the world, the limitations of subject-oriented LS, as well as the background to why LSLC was started in Japan as a countermeasure to these challenges.
Teachers’ challenges: dealing with motivational issues
Since the 1980s, a safer environment to assure learning has become a need around the world. Children’s problematic behaviours have been a major issue in education in developed countries and the responses towards such behaviours taken by the school managers are likely to be punitive ones (Utley et al., 2002). In such schools, obviously, children’s learning is likely to be disturbed and to result in lower performance (Leithwood, Harris and Strauss, 2010). In response to such a situation, the authorities in many Western countries have established more neoliberal reform to let schools compete in a ranking system with the expectation that such competition would push schools to satisfy conditions and standards set by the authorities (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009).
At the same time there is a concern for an alternative to punitive approaches towards problematic behaviours of children. There are increasing numbers of practices and knowledge bodies that demonstrate the importance of proactive and preventive interventions, with emphasis on reciprocal, caring and positive school behaviours (Lassen, Steel and Sailor, 2006). Questions were asked about the overemphasis on ranking based on academic achievement and how that influences teaching and learning processes. Wrigley (2003) points out that direct instruction for merit only does not help children become interested in nor motivated about
learning – successful learning should take more collaborative forms based on group learning.
This move is pertinent because one-way instruction in traditional modes does not benefit children. Such a style of education – called the banking concept of education by Freire (1970) – forces learners to memorise items. The alternative approaches suggest the importance of collaboration among children and between children and teachers (Webb, 2013), based on mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve the problem together (Roschelle and Teaseley, 1995). Further, it is important to note that it is not only children in lowly performing schools that need a change of instruction. Those in highly performing schools are just as alienated by traditional classroom practices for they find no meaning in memorisation (Sidorkin, 2004).
Leithwood et al. (2010) claim that when children with lower socio-economic status (SES) form the majority in a school their achievements tend to be lower. Such children are victims of the pressure of socio-economic gaps. There is a greater risk for such children to experience poverty, malnutrition, domestic violence, or divorce of parents (Wong et al., 2013). Ethnic discrimination can be another factor to consider in multi-cultural societies. In New South Wales, Australia, for example, there is a spontaneous tendency for Western and non-Western students to segregate themselves in the choice of schools to attend. This is mainly due to neo-liberal policies of school choice which sadly mitigates against the building up of mixed communities (Sweller, Graham and Bergen, 2012). Such a tendency further produces and reproduces segregation and labelling, an insidious social stigma upon children and their schools. Likewise, as the competition under neo-liberal economic reform intensifies in general and the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, more people would experience severely deprived life situations. This means there will be more children with such difficulties coming to schools. Again, the question is how to turn children’s attention to learning under such difficult circumstances? Furthermore, the other question is how much have academics responded to such a need – particularly in connecting the details of the learning situation of children with daily classroom practices?
Issues of subject-oriented lesson study
From such a perspective, we notice there are some issues in the way previous research in LS was done. First, their research was likely to be conducted in schools where disruptive issues as demonstrated above do not arise, or researchers would not have much interest in such issues. In previous research, much attention was paid to the knowledge of teachers in subject matter and teaching (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wang-Iverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007). In the situation of schools where children escape from learning, teachers need to start by struggling with the problem of keeping such children inside the classrooms and getting them ready for lessons. Teachers in such schools can be worn out simply trying to keep children quiet and making them pay attention to what
teachers say. However, in the literature on subject-oriented LS hitherto, such kinds of disruption issues and the measures taken to remedy them have seldom been discussed. All of them do discuss how to teach a particular subject as communities (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wang-Iverson and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007) – yet there are so many problems to be faced before one can reach that stage.
Secondly, in a subject-oriented LS framework, the participation of teachers is confined at a partial level and not the entire school. Lim et al. (2011) find that in the 66 per cent of Singaporean schools where teachers conduct LS the participation rate of LS is less than 40 per cent of the entire school teachers. Furthermore, much research focuses on certain subjects only, mathematics being the usual one (Fernandez, 2005; Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004; Wiburg and Brown, 2007). So there is a great possibility that there is a gap between teachers who are engaged in LS and those who are not.
The need to engage the entire school in order to change classroom practices has been pointed out by academics. Hargreaves calls the schism inside the school ‘Balkanisation’ and says that it hinders the process of school reform. Ainscow, Barrs and Martin (1998) claim that it is likely to be difficult to collaborate and share innovation across subject departments. Kyriakides (2005) points out that a difference between effective schools and non-effective schools is that there is a smaller variance in practices in effective schools. So within the framework of subject-oriented LS, it is hard to address these issues.
Thirdly, there is the question of how to deprivatise practices under the framework of subject-oriented LS. It is inevitable, from a systemic perspective, that under this type of LS framework joint planning is conducted and mutual observation of each other’s practices is not frequently done (Saito, 2012). However, Leithwood et al. (2010) underline the importance of mutual observation and reflection to change the situation in badly performing schools. There is a strong need for teachers to actually know what children are like and how they learn in different subjects. Teachers need to modify their teaching strategies impromptu when faced with unexpected responses from children. The more professional teachers can do this instantly (Sato, Akita and Iwakawa, 1993) but skills need to be sharpened through observation and mutual reflection as often as possible. Particularly, as Kitada (2007) points out, teachers hone their skills through listening to expert teachers’ narratives and reflection as often as they can. In the subject-oriented LS framework, there is likely to be a scarcity of such opportunities.
History of LSLC
The beginning of LSLC in Japan
Since the 1980s the situation in schools has gradually grown violent and Manabu Sato realised that there would be a huge backlash against school education and teachers (Sato, 2005). He intuitively sensed that it would become a question about
democracy in schools and there would be a strong demand for reorganising and reforming schools as democratic communities but this could only come from within (Sato, 2005).Thus he kept doing action research with teachers and eventually in 1996, published a book, entitled Critique on Curriculum, which sets out the vision and philosophical foundation of LSLC.
In response to Sato’s vision and philosophy of LSLC three pilot primary schools pioneered the approach: Hamanogo, Ojiya and Hiromi. However, before going into detail about the trials in these schools, we need to understand the background to that period.
Japanese society was undergoing a particularly tough time as the nineties drew to a close. In the 1980s, the Japanese economy had been very strong; it gave rise to what was called the ‘Bubble Economy’. Japanese products were in great demand and sold well abroad. The yen grew in strength. The employment rate was high and graduates could find jobs very easily. Life-long employment was regarded as almost guaranteed and few people had any doubts it would always be there. It would have been hard for anyone to imagine being sacked in the middle of his career if he had not done anything wrong.
However, the Bubble Economy ended in 1990 and the Japanese economy began to slow down from the very beginning of that year. At the start, it was still not very widely felt but by the middle of the 1990s there was no escape from the obvious. When the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997 it made a great impact on people’s lives. Even white collar workers who had always been assured of employment until they came to retirement age were subjected to retrenchment and early dismissal. This traumatic change in socio-economic realities had an immense impact on the educational aspirations of the times.Within Japanese society the chief motivation or justification for the pursuit of education had been the assurance of financial stability in later life. The assumption was that if one studied hard one would make it to a good high school and then later, to a well-known university, and of course, following graduation, one would get a job with a renowned company. Teachers and parents encouraged children to succeed by memorising the contents of textbooks and by practising a lot of drills. Those who gave up learning would be that minority who could not cope with such mechanical learning for various reasons and consequently exhibited juvenile delinquency problems.
However, with the recession that came after the Asian financial crisis, even the children of white collar workers started to become problematic because their parents became unemployed. The result of this phenomenon was that children began to lose the motivation for rote learning since it was not longer clear why they had to do this (Kariya, 2001). All their best efforts would not guarantee them good jobs. Naturally they began to think that it would be better to enjoy their present lives and certainly rote learning was pushed down to the bottom of their priorities. At the same time unemployment bringing about stress to the family and relationships became problematic. Consequently, divorce rates increased sharply. In 1998 it was 1.94 percentile and in 1999, 2.00 percentile as compared with 1.26 in 1988 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2013). At the same time the number of suicides rapidly increased to 30,000 cases in 1998 and has continued at this rate until today
(Cabinet Office, 2012). Children were forced to live under such hard circumstances and found themselves in a very vulnerable position.
The stressful lives of children and their loss of hope in learning led to a new problem for schools: many children began to avoid learning, the Japanese term for it being ‘escape from learning’ (Sato, 2000). Escape from learning means the rejection of learning or rejection of participation in learning during lesson time or a reluctance to study. Escape from learning is a broad concept and it means basically negative attitudes towards learning but it can also take concrete forms of daydreaming, putting their heads on the desks or chit-chatting during lesson times and some may even be excusing themselves from classrooms without any justifiable reasons (Sato and Sato, 2003). Sato (2000) points out that despite the widespread belief that Japanese children are eager students, busy studying hard and going for extra tuition after school hours, the majority of them actually reject learning starting from the upper graders in primary schools and the amount of time they spend in study is the least in the world (National Institute of Educational Policy Research, 2000).
Sato (2000) situates the emergence of escape from learning in the wake of the collapse of the East Asian Educational Development Model (EAEDM) which was associated with the end of the Bubble Economy. Sato (2000) claims that EAEDM is found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, North Korea and China. He lists the characteristics of EAEDM as: (1) compressed modernisation to enable upward social mobility through provision of educational opportunity to the nationals; (2) emphasis on competition; (3) slant towards industrial development; (4) centralised bureaucratic control; (5) strong emphasis on nationalism; and (6) immaturity of collaboration and association in educational system and practices.
In EAEDM, competition among children is emphasised because the purpose of schooling is reduced to achieving high scores in examinations. Such a view of education is represented in Figure 1.1, where schooling is perceived and constructed in a hierarchical manner. It is revealing that interests of the children are located at the bottom of the structure and are described as ‘outcome and assessment’.
EAEDM functions well when the national economy is undergoing a rapid industrialisation process. However, if such a process stops, then EAEDM loses its positive impact. In Japan, its end was signalled by an emergence of increased school violence beginning in the early 1980s. Basically the cause of this dysfunction can be attributed to the transformation of the function and meaning of the school system. Schooling was no longer able to ensure social mobility; rather it became a divisive agent, stratifying children in two groups, a minority of ‘winners’ and a majority of ‘losers’. The sad truth was that for the majority of Japanese children, the school system was a place for them to fail (Sato, 2000).
The birth of LSLC began when Manabu Sato proposed a different approach to reforming schools – not by implementing educational policies in a hierarchical structure and order but based on children’s needs for learning (Sato, 1996). He was an educational scholar who was most acutely aware of the realities of Japanese schools. By the end of the 1990s he had visited Japanese classrooms close to
Discipline/culture
Social demands
Curriculum development system
Educational goal
Developing material package
Lesson Practice
Outcome & assessment
Source: Sato (1996)
10,000 times. In 1998, against such a backdrop of social, economic and educational pressures three pilot schools of LSLC were established: Hamanogo Primary School, Ojiya Primary School and Hiromi Primary School. Today, there are 1,500 primary schools, 2,000 junior high schools, and 300 senior high schools running LSLC in Japan (Sato, 2012). The large numbers are all the more remarkable when we remember that the movement started with only three schools in 1998. These three schools were at the primary level, but in 2001 when Mr Masaaki Sato, the principal of Hiromi, was transferred to Gakuyo Junior High School he initiated reform there. Gakuyo was one of the most problematic schools in the city but by applying LSLC Mr Massaki was able to achieve a dramatic turnaround within just a couple of years. This was the first pilot school at the secondary level and it showed the way for teachers at the secondary level to run LSLC. The start of LSLC might have been humble but it spread gradually all over Japan by word of mouth at the beginning and later, through the influence of various publications (Ose and Sato, 2000; Ose and Sato, 2003; Sato, 2003; Sato, 2005; Sato and Sato, 2003).
Further development?
What, then, has been done under the name of LSLC? LSLC has a unique vision and philosophy quite different from the usual lesson study approaches. The most important vision under LSLC is to establish democracy – the associated ways of living (Dewey, 1916; Higgins, 2010). It means that regardless of their backgrounds people can live and learn together at the best quality level. To achieve this, it is necessary to ensure that there are learning opportunities and rights for all children, all teachers and for as many parents and local people as possible. When this is done
FIGURE 1.1 Hierarchical View on Education (EAEDM)
the philosophies of publicness, equality and excellence are underlined. So, first, all teachers need to participate in LSLC beyond the boundaries of their subject areas. Second, regardless of their status, experiences or factions, teachers need to participate with other teachers in LSLC. Third, there should not be any compromise – teachers need to keep seeking improvement in their practices.
In order to translate such convictions into reality in the Japanese experience the activity system in the school was organised with three major emphases: first, the basic unit for activities resided in groups on their form level. Second, observation and reflection constituted the central official activities for teacher learning. Third, in addition to the second point, lesson observations and reflections were done at a high frequency, at least every two weeks in each form group.
Regarding the first point, graders’ groups or form groups need to be the unit of activities in LSLC which are, namely, observation and reflection. This is to make it easier for teachers to discuss children and their learning first. Quality of learning is important and needs to be discussed but teachers have to be able to understand how children are and whether they can learn or not. This is because teachers need to improvise their design of learning on an impromptu basis in response to the situation of children and without that capacity it is difficult for them to provide the best learning opportunities for children.
In conventional LS, in contrast, there is a tendency for subject departments to be units of lesson study at the secondary school level and even at the primary levels the focus would often be on particular subjects. Such an organisation of lesson study is unlikely to help teachers pay attention to the realities of children and their learning. Rather, it tends to confine them to discussion only about subject matters or preparation of tasks. It also invariably leads teachers to develop departmental schisms in vision, vocabularies and practices in the schools and to a separation between daily practices and research lessons.
With regard to the second point, in conventional lesson study, there is a strong emphasis on activities prior to observation and reflection. This means that much time is spent on curriculum research, study of the content, joint planning and so forth. However, the reality is that there is no perfect plan. Furthermore, there is a great likelihood that children would respond very differently from what teachers expect. For example, there might be children who give up learning and start to sleep. In other cases, children may catch teachers off-guard by revealing an unexpected misconception that is fundamental to learning the given topic. Then again children might not work as nicely in groups as teachers would have expected. Under such circumstances what would you do? What is the best way for teachers to bring such children back into the world of learning? What we need to do is to face the realities first and then to think about possible alternatives or solutions to the issues and problems. Actually, one of the most important learning points in LSLC is how to respond to unexpected realities demonstrated by the children. If we slant too much on the side of joint planning or prior activities, we keep missing this important part of learning.
As for the third point, it is obvious that if we conduct observation and reflection just once or twice in a year, few things would change. Teachers would tend to show
up and ‘demonstrate’ ‘unusual’ lessons to other teachers. This is inevitable because opening practices is rare. It is necessary to make it a habit in a school to observe and learn from the practices of each other. More importantly, significant professional learning is likely to happen during observation and joint reflection and it is necessary to maximise this opportunity. Sato (2006) says that it is only after around 30 times at the entire school level that the culture and practice of that school will start to change.
What has happened in Japan was that LSLC started in a quiet way but quickly caught the attention of educators around the country. Today there is at least one pilot LSLC school in each prefecture. So within 15 years the educational landscape of Japan has been influenced or touched by LSLC in a positive way. Teachers have been able to find a way out of their struggles and problems in their daily practices. It is not only about teaching techniques or skills; rather, it is a serious matter concerning the existential problems of teachers, children, schools and society.
What has been described above about LSLC is visually represented below (Figure 1.2). Teachers conduct their practices based on the needs of children and their learning; then they critique and reflect on these practices. Such critiques and reflections would promote both professional and curriculum development, would inform discipline and culture which would in turn impact children, leading to change in the practices. It can be clearly seen that the biggest difference between this model and that of the hierarchical one shown in Figure 1.1 is that each factor is connected and networked as a rhizome with no particular finishing point. This means that it is a never-ending process and teachers, children and schools continue to grow, even if slowly and gradually, without an end point.
As we have discussed earlier, the socio-economic problems in Japan have persisted for more than two decades and circumstances for children have been growing increasingly severe. Inevitably, it has become more difficult for children to be engaged in learning and many of them have been led into juvenile delinquency because of the increase in family and community breakdown caused
Source: Sato (1996)
FIGURE 1.2 Rhizome Model of Educational Reform (LSLC)
by socio-economic issues such as poverty or unemployment. At the same time, there has been an increase in political manipulations and pressures on schools and teachers: more right-wing and ultra-conservative politicians with power and popularity are using their status to bash teachers, schools and the boards of education, pressing them for ‘accountability’ (Saito and Murase, 2011). Such politicians create a public sense of temporary euphoria by penalising teachers and accusing them of being lazy or not doing a proper job from neo-liberalistic and fanatically nationalistic points of view.
Under the weight of all these pressures, many teachers have come to see LSLC as one of the very few solutions available to make schools and classrooms more truly school-like and classroom-like: that is, giving a place for every child to learn meaningfully with a sense of security. Through LSLC, both children and teachers feel there is an increase in the pleasure of learning. Then, because of the success of Gakuyo Junior High School (Saito and Sato, 2012; Sato and Sato, 2003) in turning around one of the most problematic schools in the country to one of the best performing schools, more teachers, even at the secondary levels, have started to pay attention to LSLC.
Expansion to other parts of the world
LSLC is an attempt to revisit, translate and re-vitalise a Western educational vision and philosophy according to educational practices for the Japanese context. In the same way as the philosophy of Aristotle had been preserved and developed in Islamic countries before the West ‘discovered’ it, the scholars and practitioners of LSLC aim to develop and activate democracy in education in Japan, as well as around the world at a time when neo-liberalism and ultra-conservatism are popular trends. More recently, especially after the 2000s, LSLC is being introduced to other Asian countries: China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore. The authors of this book have been involved in such an introduction to South East Asian countries, in particular, to the latter three countries. In some cases, the national ministries have become agencies in disseminating LSLC in their countries. It remains still to be seen what sort of roles these ministries will play and how they might adjust LSLC visions and philosophies in the long term. For now, attention from other countries around the world continues to grow.
However, still there is a huge need to explain what LSLC is about to international practitioners outside Japan. This book provides the whole picture of LSLC in English. The next chapter is about the vision and philosophy of LSLC. The vision is higher quality learning opportunities for every single child, professional learning opportunities for every single teacher and opportunities for as many parents and local communities as possible to participate in learning at schools. The philosophy of LSLC is to deprivatise practices to the school community, to establish equality inside the school and to strive for excellence in learning together.
The third chapter will discuss how to create more time for teachers. School reform, in general, is a time-consuming activity. LSLC is a professional and
community-oriented school reform, so time is a crucial factor. In this chapter, there will be an explanation of general principles involved in creating more time and the introduction of some cases where this has been achieved.
Then there will be a discussion on management and leadership issues in Chapter 4. How to organise teachers within and how to work with external resource persons will be discussed. For internal stakeholders, there will be discussion on what kinds of roles managers, teachers and children should take up. Then, turning to external stakeholders, parents and local communities, local educational authorities and resource persons are the focus of discussion.
The aim in Chapter 5 is to discuss the procedure and framework of LSLC: units of activities, focal points of LSLC and informal activities will be introduced. Then, since the entire school is involved, setting up a schedule for regular activity becomes extremely vital. Thus in the latter half of this chapter, there will be a discussion on regular time slots, annual plans and conducting research lessons.
Chapter 6 focuses on how to reform daily lessons. Although this book is about LSLC, the actual goal of LSLC is not merely doing observation of and reflection on lessons but, more importantly, reforming daily practices at classroom levels and the culture of a school. Without daily effort to change practices, LSLC cannot produce any results. In other words, daily effort is most important and LSLC is a venue to share issues and discuss problems as well as to make breakthroughs together in learning how to put the vision of LSLC into daily practices. In this chapter, pedagogical reform on daily basis will be discussed.
In Chapter 7, we deal with what has to be done in conducting and observing a research lesson. In the first half, there will be points that teachers conducting a research lesson should keep in mind – keeping a lesson simple and ordinary, taking turns with each other and ensuring growth as professionals.Then in the second half, what observers have to do will be explained, such as: perspectives and positions, recording observations and etiquette as observers.
Chapter 8 is about how to discuss observed lessons in case conferences for joint reflection. Joint reflection in case conferences is the core in the process of LSLC. In order to make it most fruitful, there are some issues for participants to keep in mind, namely two-phased discourses and the use of video. Then in this chapter, how to moderate and facilitate discussion will be covered too.
Finally, in Chapter 9, we look at how to sustain LSLC and how to hand it over to a new generation in the school. It should be pointed out that people cannot change immediately so patience is most important when promoting LSLC. Issues requiring patience will be discussed in the first half. Then in the second half of the chapter, how to respond to turnover of staff, namely teachers and principals, will be discussed. Turnover of staff is certainly a loss to their schools. However, at the same time, it is also a good opportunity to renew understanding and reconfirm the vision and philosophy of LSLC. There will be discussions on how to go through such periods and how to make them more positive.
2 WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL CAN BE CREATED BY REFORM UNDER LSLC?
In this chapter we will reflect on the kind of school that LSLC will enable us to create. There are two parts to it: first, the LSLC vision for reform, and next, its philosophy. You may think that these are vague and abstract matters but vision and philosophy are important in promoting reform since they tell us where we are going. School reform is not only a matter of ‘how’ – this is actually secondary. If you wish to take up a leadership role in your school, people will start to ask you what they should do and why. In order for your colleagues to properly understand the nature of the desired reform and the reasons for it, it is crucial that you have a deep understanding of the vision and philosophy of LSLC. Essentially, it is to build up a school that ensures high quality learning for every child, learning opportunities for all teachers to grow as professionals, and avenues of participation for parents and local community in learning. Further, LSLC results in creating public space in the school by opening up its processes, establishing equality and striving together for excellence.
Setting up a vision for reform
What does it mean to set up a vision for reforming your school? In order to get our heads around this question, let us consider who the protagonists are in schools. They are the children, of course. It is crucial that children have an environment in which they can maximise their learning experience. But are they all currently doing so? No. Thus, we have the first reason to set up a vision. We must also not forget you, the teachers: you are also protagonists of a school. Then too, parents and people in the local community are important characters in the life of your school. Under the vision of LSLC, each of these groups of people should be ‘main characters’. Let us consider this goal in detail below.
Assuring access to higher-quality learning opportunities for every single child
Children come to your school to learn. This is a very simple and obvious fact. However, is every single child, in a real sense, assured of adequate opportunities for learning? What are the assumptions of learning? Do we know how students learn? Who are our students? Are there biased views of who our students are? Do we ‘classify’ students based on ill-constructed ways of ‘banding’ them? Are students’ performances the best way to stereotype how students learn? LSLC challenges these notional unexamined assumptions or falsified teachers’ beliefs and personal theories. We must stop and consider what has to be done in order to ensure higher-quality learning opportunities for every single child – this is what we must set as our vision.
Teachers have a tendency to divide children into groups and treat them differently. This is because of the belief that different treatments are inevitable, more natural and more efficient: it seems more logical that teachers organise different tasks for different groups because their pace of learning apparently differs. However, if teachers hold such beliefs and tendencies, it will be extremely hard to achieve any assurance of equal educational opportunity for every child. Behind such beliefs is a huge ignorance about a simple fact: children can grow and change. Their current state will not necessarily always remain the same. Change can happen through mutual interaction and collaboration among children and with teachers. An important part of a teacher’s job is to help children realise this change for good and not to stigmatise them so early in their lives.
What we have to keep in mind as teachers is the need to accept all kinds of children. This is because every child is a protagonist in his or her own life. However poor and challenging their circumstances or even academic performance may be, they must be regarded and respected as citizens. It is all the more crucial that they be received in such a light because school invariably has the greatest impact on their young lives outside of their families. If a school upholds a high view of the place of the child (and hopefully, all schools do) it must accept children of whatever background without exception. Whether or not they are high achievers we, as teachers, should always accept them.
To be more concrete, during lessons when a teacher calls on a child, his or her intention is to see whether the child’s response is correct or not. However, if a mistake is made, there is always a reason behind it. So the fundamental thing for a teacher is to listen – listen to why and how the child has come to this conclusion. If children start to perceive you as a person who listens, they will start to feel secure learning with you and settle down to their work.
Another important point here is that we can learn a lot from children’s mistakes or misconceptions. By transforming mistakes into a text that we can share and enquire into together, both children and teachers can learn much more deeply about the concepts or theories presented than if they are seeking right answers only. In other words, children are connected to curriculum via their experiences (Dewey, 1990) and their mistakes and misconceptions can be the mediator between
themselves and what is taught as curriculum. If many children make the same mistake, then by unpacking the process of the misconception together, we can show them what has gone wrong and stop other children from falling into the same trap. If we take this perspective, it becomes nonsensical to classify children into those who can answer correctly and those who cannot. Every child is precious, and every remark or idea of his or hers is also valuable as a springboard for learning. What is most important is that a teacher creates an environment where everyone can be at ease saying anything, seeking help and learning together (Webb and Mastergeorge, 2003).
The role of teachers is to set up learning opportunities where everyone can be engaged, as we have already noted. There are various types of children with various sorts of issues related to family problems, academic failure, past traumatic experiences in the classroom, relationships with friends, and so forth.Whatever their backgrounds or contexts, whoever they are, if they feel supported, they will learn and grow in a healthy way. It is therefore crucial that we foster a culture in the classroom and school that allows for a caring interdependence and fallibility in learning. Children and teachers need to support each other and work towards high quality learning through collaboration. To do this, what they need is not evaluation or assessment, not to be told ‘This is what you are’, but instead, empathy and friends who say ‘I am here for you’. Such a relationship can be developed even at the lower grades in primary schools (see Figure 2.1).
By creating classrooms where everyone can depend on and learn from each other with full confidence, we can help troubled children open up both to other children and to teachers. In this way they can develop a sense of trust of others, and gradually begin to change their relationships with other people, with learning, and with themselves.
FIGURE 2.1 Caring for another pupil’s learning
As we come to realise that caring and learning are closely linked under LSLC we also begin to see how ‘learning’ in this context is complex. As Cazden (2001) points out, there are three aspects to learning: cognitive, social and ethical. Many people automatically identify learning with cognitive activities, a definition which is not wrong, but which is incomplete. In learning, even in an ordinary lesson, there are also social aspects that concern the establishment of relationships with others. Likewise, ethical aspects also exist, related to internal matters such as the identity or moral code of the learner. So the question pursued under LSLC is how to ensure that each child has the opportunity to engage with learning in a complex way. Through daily lessons, teachers are expected to provide every single child with intelligent challenges and the opportunity for collaboration with classmates as well as for personal inner reflection.
Assuring the availability of learning opportunities for every single teacher to grow
Under LSLC, teachers pursue two concerns: ensuring care between children and between children and themselves as well as maintaining a high quality of learning in their daily practice. This sounds simple, but you may find that it is actually not so easy. It requires professional capacities because setting up challenging tasks requires a teacher to be strong in both subject knowledge and pedagogical understanding. He or she must be able to add to these skills other wider liberal arts knowledge and implement this in the curriculum and in daily lesson plans. Then, the teacher needs to tailor tasks that will challenge children intelligently at the level of understanding that they demonstrate. Furthermore, she or he needs to provide opportunities for children to collaborate, and to facilitate their interaction if necessary. On top of all this, the teacher has time limitations, both daily and in terms of the progress of the year as a whole. What a complex job! The demands are significant and the overall talent and capacity expected are high.
It is not a matter of mere pedagogical techniques to meet these needs, as misunderstood by many teachers or bureaucrats (Bjork, 2005; Saito et al., 2008). An internal shift is needed – from that of ‘endpoint bureaucrats’, who believe their job is to finish the curriculum in time for examination, to that of ‘autonomous professionals’, who attempt their best to maximise quality of learning of children each time (Bjork, 2005; Karakaya, 2004; Saito et al., 2008). An ‘endpoint bureaucrat’ does not have to worry about whether children are actually learning and whether they are satisfied with their learning. Without any change in instructional methods mandated by the higher authorities, she or he does not feel any necessity to change her or his practices: even if such change is expected, she or he, in some cases, may hardly respond.
A professional, in contrast, always reflects on her or his practices as a habit of mind, and tinkers with them on a daily basis in a process of continuous improvement. Why? To provide children with a better education! To achieve that purpose, a teacher always needs to keep learning. Learning can take place in self-reflection, study, or conversations with colleagues.
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