3rd Session with Peggy…

Lesson Study (or kenkyu jugyo) is a teaching improvement process that has origins in Japanese elementary education, where it is a widespread professional development practice. Working in a small group, teachers collaborate with one another, meeting to discuss learning goals, to plan an actual classroom lesson (called a "research lesson"), to observe how it works in practice, and then to revise and report on the results so that other teachers can benefit from it (Wikipedia, 2011).

The above are the exact steps that Ms Peggy mentioned in the session pertaining to Lesson Study where it acts as a professional development tool or process that teachers engage in to systematically examine their own practices.

Differenciation is the focused word for this session. Differentiating instruction requires a degree of preparation. As a teacher, one should differentiate your instruction; in other words, teach using a variety of techniques and strategies that address the varying needs of all students. The teacher may have to scaffold the higher level learners yet accommodate to the struggling learners, all at the same time while focusing on the objective of the activity. Learning to differentiate instruction is a process. If the teacher truly wants to succeed, one should take it in small steps and constantly revise what does not work.

There were five learning points that we took away from the two case studies (videos) in relation to Lesson Study:

-         Design of task (Mathematical investigation)

-         Clear instructions and demonstrations

-         Effective questioning

-         Effective use of materials

-         Differentiation for different ability learners

The other focus for this session is the conservation of numbers through visualization. Using the unifix cubes and tangram are some activities that a teacher can implement in class to enhance children’s visualization skills. The unifix cubes lesson is to help children learn the idea of conservation of number. That is, no matter how the cubes are arranged, the number remains the same. Our group won with 25 structures using 5 unifix cubes each. YEAH!!!

With the tangram activity as homework, I could practice visualization with the rotations, reflections, or translations, and putting together or taking the tangram apart in different ways. This activity will definitely help children to develop their spatial memory and spatial visualization skills, to recognize and apply transformations.

Ms Peggy concluded the session requesting for us to write our feeling on the session. Mine was ‘Eye-Opener’.