General Grievous for Use Your Imagination – Learning Power 6

g-grievousBackground

The unveiling of Learning Power 5 coincided with our Japanese style whole-school Lesson Study. This event, which is set to become a termly fixture due to the awesomeness of the experience, took place in week 7 of Term 5. All teaching staff met in our Key Stage groups on Monday after school. Our mission, which we chose to accept, was to plan a problem solving based maths lesson pulling together as many features of growth mindset, Philosophy for Children and formative learning as we could muster. Putting our golden year of staff development towards a cutting edge formative learning experience for the children – and as it turned out – for us.

The Japanese model
‘Japan has succeeded in developing a system that not only develops teachers but also develops knowledge about teaching that is relevant to classrooms and sharable among the members of the teaching profession… When Japanese teachers plan a lesson collaboratively, they treat the result as a joint product whose ownership is shared by all in the group. When one teacher teaches the lesson and the others observe, problems that emerge are generally attributed to the lesson as designed by the group, not to the teacher who implemented the lesson. It thus becomes possible for teachers to become critical without offending their colleague. The discussion can focus more pointedly and deeply on the merits and deficiencies of the lesson and on the process of revising and improving it.’