Professional development for educators is a hot topic these days. Seminars, workshops, and all-day intensives are required just to keep our classroom leaders in the loop. With so much training, why are schools still struggling to put all of this knowledge into practice? As this article from KQED News suggests, the answer might be a new technique known as lesson study. It represents a paradigm shift for schools in the United States, but this style of education has a rich history in Japan. Lesson study takes a team approach to teaching. The team focuses on the instruction itself and not on the educator. This avoids nit-picking performance notes for the educator and really dials on the lesson being taught.

Displacing the burden of developing a solid lesson plan off of the individual teacher and onto a group of teachers creates a sense of community—along with encouraging critical thinking about the lesson itself. While this has proven very effective in some cases, others complain that the approach is too time consuming to implement. Of course, it’s hard to argue with the results. As the article reports, of the hundreds of methods to improve math teaching, lesson study was one of two approaches deemed most effective. So perhaps it’s time to make your professional development a group effort. As the saying goes, sometimes it takes a village.