Outtake: Reaching New Possibilities on Lesson Study Collaboration

As a group of five early-career Mathematics Teacher Educators (MTEs), we are fortunate to collaborate with each other to focus on our teaching and research. Early in our collaboration, as we planned a lesson to gather data from our preservice teachers (PSTs) on their mathematical noticing, we realized that not only could we study our PSTs’ learning, we could also research ourselves, our lesson and instruction. In this outtake, we discuss our “aha” moment during collaboration and how that has taken our teaching and research to a whole new dimension.

Our journey began when we established a research group to explore PSTs’ ability to make whole class instructional decisions based on analysis of written student work using the professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking constructs (Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010). We designed a lesson to engage our PSTs with these ideas (Gupta, Soto, Dick, Broderick, & Appelgate, 2018). We regularly met via Google Hangout to discuss the lesson and reflect on our teaching of it. One day it was a like a light bulb went off—“Oh my gosh!” In the process of constructively critiquing the lesson and our teaching of it, we were essentially engaging in a lesson study across five different institutions in five different states. It was truly an “aha!” moment for us. We were excited and wanted to formalize this research process.