Each grade level team consisting of classroom teachers, special education and ESOL teachers met with Dr. Suh to identify an instructional area for improvement and through the Lesson Study process deepened their mathematical understanding for teaching. This teacher led professional development model empowered teachers as they worked collectively to work through the challenges they encounter in teaching and learning their unique and diverse student population. Below are some of the teacher comments from the Lesson Study experience.

“It is so valuable to have the time to hear what others are doing and how others problem solve some of the learning issues that came up during a lesson. The lessons are stronger and the teaching language and sequence is much clearer with the collaboration.” 1^st grade teacher.

 “I love the conversations we had about what will or won’t work in a lesson (strengthening it before we teach the lesson.) Making the concept map for relating fractions and decimals helped me see the parallels and how I can relate the two units.” 5^th grade teacher

“I was interested in the terms composing, decomposing, compatible numbers – as a new way of looking at things I’ve taught.” Kindergarten teacher

This past winter, Dr. Jennifer Suh worked with K-6 teachers from Westlawn Elementary School, in Falls Church, Virginia on Lesson Study. Lesson study is a Japanese form of instructional improvement strategy which involves collaborative planning and observation of live classroom lessons by a group of teachers who collect data on teaching and learning and collaboratively analyzing it (Lewis, 2002a, 2002b; Lewis & Tsuchida, 1997,1998; Wang-Iverson &Yoshida, 2005).