Planning and Reflecting on Teaching: Is there Any Relief in Sight?
From Richard C. Larson
Anyone who reads the education news these days or speaks with teachers knows that most teachers feel that they’ve been hit by a tsunami. The massive wave includes constantly changing teaching requirements, many stemming from Common Core Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. It also includes reduced budgets, managing quite heterogeneous classes, and a huge number of classroom hours per year second only to Chile, among all OECD countries. And, until recently, lessons preparation was a solo job, an artisanal craft industry activity, etched somewhere into private at-home hours after dinner and perhaps after the kids go to bed. No wonder 50% of schoolteachers abandon the profession within five years! The pressure is too great, the rewards – except of course for influencing the lives of young learners – too small.

Is there any relief in site? Well, one promising innovation is web-based Lesson Sharing, providing contributing teachers with a mechanism to share their lessons with others. Typically the authors of these shared lessons are single teachers. These lessons may be offered at no charge or for a modest fee. Showing that demand is high, lesson-sharing websites now have wide followings. TeachersPayTeachers.com, for instance, has over 750,000 lessons that have been downloaded 13.7 million times. One kindergarten teacher, Deanna Jump, has earnings from TeachersPayTeachers in excess of $1,000,000. Total teacher earnings have exceeded $30,000,000. BetterLesson.com has over 600,000 lessons, and in 2013 averaged over 300,000 visitors a month. ShareMyLesson.com, a project of the American Federation of Teachers, has been one of the fastest growing of these websites, with nearly 250,000 lessons contributed in its first year of operation. Though the online lesson-sharing space is diverse and each of the websites utilizes a unique approach, all lesson-sharing websites have two main goals: public posting of lesson plans and curation to help organize and identify the appropriate lesson for each teacher. To achieve these goals, lesson-sharing websites either use experts or crowd sourcing, with and without money exchanged. Problem: The curation is uneven, and the time spent by a teacher seeking the perfect, posted lesson might equal or exceed her/his time saved by using someone else’s excellent lesson.

Bring in “Lesson Study,” the joint production of a single lesson by a small team of teachers over the course of a few months. The resulting lesson plan – typically truly excellent – is usually ‘on paper’ and used only locally. Lesson Study has become ubiquitous in Japan and is catching in the U.S., for instance in Florida with CPALMS leading the way. The goal of Lesson Study is actually less about the lesson itself being delivered to students in a classroom, and more about small groups of teachers working together collaboratively, focused on using the latest pedagogical theories to create the near-perfect lesson. It allows teachers to reflect deeply on their profession and to improve each of her/his lessons, even those not subject to Lesson Study scrutiny.

With this as background, we call your attention to a new paper, Lesson Study and Lesson Sharing: An Appealing Marriage, coauthored by Mackenzie Hird, Richard Larson, Yuko Okubo, and Kanji Uchino. The paper reviews the history and status of both Lesson Sharing and Lesson Study, and proposes a “marriage made in heaven,” that is creating web sites that share Lesson-Study-produced lesson plans. This would involve some policy changes, in particular regarding number of hours a teacher works per year and other steps in PD – Professional Development. The paper will soon be posted on the web for all to see, and it is being submitted for journal publication. We will happily send it to you if you email Professor Richard Larson at rclarson@mit.edu.

Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is also the Director of MIT LINC and the Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS.

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