Crafting Research Theme

Lesson Study is a professional development process and involves teachers collaboratively investigating their own practice to become more effective.

Such investigation involves planning, teaching, observing, critiquing and revising a small number of lessons. These lessons are called ‘study lessons’ or ‘research lessons’. It is in these lessons that teachers study, research and investigate teaching and learning.

To provide direction and focus, an over-arching goal and the related research questions should be set right in the beginning.

The first step in the lesson study process is to formulate this over-arching goal, sometimes referred to as research theme, and the related research questions.

These are some drafts of research theme articulated by the participants of the lesson study course. The research themes are broad and long-term in nature. And they are linked to the vision of the department, school and Ministry of Education.

The research theme can be adopted by lesson study teams in different grade levels and for different mathematics lessons on various topics.

The research theme is broad to provide a wider range of learning experiences. The research questions, based on the research theme, can be made more specific.

For the research theme selected, what are the ideal characteristics of the students? What are the actual characteristics of the students? Hence, what is the gap between the two? How do we close the gaps? These are the questions that the subsequent stages of the lesson-study process aim to provide answers to.