•  Make plans and have backup plans for different parts of a lesson
• Understanding how in-depth lesson planning can be – we were writing a script for a show (including lines, blocking, intonation, tone, etc)
• The importance of considering what the board will look like when planning lessons
• Anticipate student responses to each step of the lesson  - think about “What will I do if this happens?”
• Anticipating student responses in an organized way and having a group of teachers think about it
• It is so well-thought out and drafted and we are still editing the lesson
• We teach different levels and students, but we focused on shared goals and as a result, our lesson engages all students – we were able to find common ground and collaborate in spite of our different teaching styles
• Before this project, I might have just thought students would just have known/done certain things – what we’ve done is to make those steps explicit and anticipate problems and interventions
• First draft took three hours and was 8 pages long

• The lesson plan was written by the observers – the observers are focused on the students (not on the teacher) and how they are responding to/learning from each step of the lesson
• Observations focused on the group’s lesson – the lesson anticipated student responses and possible teacher replies – this allowed observers to look for those moments
• Observations are not about being evaluated, but about working on/perfecting our teaching craft
• We were observing/assessing each step of the lesson we wrote together
• Observation focused on students – gave us the opportunity to see where students struggle and then think about how to address each struggle
• Importance of teachers being able to observe another teachers
• Opportunity to see others in action, implementing a lesson we understand deeply, helps build up our teaching experience
• Seeing teachers do things that are similar to thing we do is reassuring
• Seeing different groups of students working on the same lesson helps us see that lesson works with different groups –as teachers, we often feel like things that work for other teachers and their students might not work for ours – this allowed us to see that our students are not all that different when it comes to their learning
• Everyone doing the observation is a teacher – part of the feeling of safety is that no one is telling anyone else what to do
• Both the observer and the observed teacher learn a lot from the observation about student learning
• The observation was only the beginning – we took notes and analyzed the student thinking and used that to revise the lesson

• We can think of a lot of things in the moment while we are teaching but this process helps us have those moments beforehand and to reflect on them together
• The number of decisions we make when you are teaching happen so quickly – this process allowed us to be more deliberate and think about why

• Going deeper into a content you think you know – reading articles, doing problems, having to be so deliberate with creating the steps to help students make connections in their reasoning

• Felt professional doing this
• The power of collective effort
• Safe space to debate decisions and say “I think this because…” and “I disagree because…”
• Safe process, where teachers can be brave and open to critique because the critique is focused on the lesson and an assessment of student thinking
• Our struggles are shared

Do the Full Lesson 

Everyone will teach part of the lesson 

• Warmup - John
• Step 1 - Billy
• Step 2 - Susan
• Step 3 & 4 - Charles 
• Step 5 & 6 - Josh 
• Step 7 - Renee and Gerry
• Step 8 - Renee 

Methods of Professional Development 

Introduction to Lesson Study/Research Lesson & Overview of Project

Choosing Our Goals and Mathematical Focus 

Proportional Reasoning versus Proportions 

Observations in Lesson Study: Structure and Benefits

Lesson Writing and Revision  in Lesson Study

Adapting Lesson Study Methods 

Gerry, John, Renee, Charles, Susan, Josh, Billy