Using classroom inquiry to improve teaching and learning – Jan. 3 & 23

Lesson Study: Using Classroom Inquiry to Improve Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
(2011) by Bill Cerbin (138 pages)

Lesson study is a simple yet focused technique for studying learning in one aspect of a course. The lesson study technique originated among teachers in Japan, and has been adapted at the University of Wisconsin to study learning in college classrooms (the author directs the UW program). Lesson study is a powerful and efficient way for faculty to improve student learning.

Read about the book.

Peter Felten will facilitate this group, and participants will be invited (but obligated) to develop a lesson study project in the spring.

Lunch will be available, so please RSVP,  including any dietary restrictions,  to Katie King (x 6449; kingcath@elon.edu). RSVP by December 14th so you can receive book before the holidays.

** Continues on January 23rd – when you RSVP you’ll be registered for both dates. **

From the introduction
Using Classroom Inquiry to Improve Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

“This volume offers guiding principles, theoretical underpinnings, fresh thinking, detailed examples, and, importantly, a window into the larger community that is now assembling itself around this important work. This is not only a book about lesson study but about teaching and learning more broadly. A deceptively simple process, Lesson Study opens a wide door to a generous set of understandings and experiences.

What Lesson Study adds to the mix is a powerful reminder that knowing what (and even how much) students learn is not enough; in order to improve educational outcomes, teachers need to understand more about how students learn. In this spirit, my favorite phrase in the volume is ‘cognitive empathy’ – a term to capture the importance of imagining how new ideas are experienced by novice learners. Doing so is pretty clearly an element of good teaching, but it is also a prodigious challenge; as experts in their field, faculty have often forgotten their own experience as one-time beginners, seeing their field’s complex concepts and ways of thinking as a given. Thus one needs not only an impulse to cognitive empathy but a process for testing and strengthening it—and that is one way of explaining the purpose of lesson study.”

Pat Hutchings
from the introduction to the book