TITLE OF PAPER:

HC-NY IP Ed Conference 2015
HC-NY IP EDUCATION CONFERENCE 2015
Submission of Report
Full Name of Teacher:
Luis Tirtasanjaya Lioe
Email address:
[email protected]
*School:
 HCI (High School)
 HCI (College)
 NYGH
*please tick 
1. This report should be emailed to
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•
•
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HCI (HS) – Dr Tan Kok Kim ([email protected])
HCI (C) – Mr Edwin Lim ([email protected])
HCI (Mother tongue papers) – Ms Yeo Tan Ching ([email protected])
NYGH – Dr Gary Laycock ([email protected])
2. Please select the relevant strand related to the theme Engaging Diverse Learners
with a tick  :
 Academic Curriculum Design
 Affective Curriculum Design
 Pedagogy
 Caring for Community / Environment
 21st Century skills
 Others (please specify) ___________________________________________
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HC-NY IP Ed Conference 2015
Title Teachers’ Collaborative Learning Experiences Through Lesson Study
Author(s)
Luis Tirtasanjaya Lioe, Tan Chik Leng, Gloria Teng Sze Ting, Clara
Poon Kah Yoke
The Questions
1. How does Lesson Study help to refine the curriculum design of Solving
Simultaneous Equations in Secondary 2 Integrated Mathematics?
2. What are the potential and challenges of implementing the Lesson Study to
achieve the above objective?
The Context
Lesson study is viewed as one of the most effective teachers' professional learning
vehicles that gives impactful improvement in the instruction. The process involves a
group of teachers to regularly plan, design, implement, evaluate and refine lessons
for a unit of work selected, where this process involves several cycles of iteration of
the above process. Lewis (2009) described the collaborative process involved in
Lesson Study cycles are formulating goals for student learning and growth, planning
a lesson to achieve these goals, observing and being observed during its
implementation, gathering and reviewing evidence of student thinking and work,
reflecting upon the lesson within the group, and revising, repeating, and sharing
findings with members outside the group.
Using the Lesson Study framework, the team of five Sec 2 Math teachers identified
two units of lessons, Simultaneous Equations and Congruence-Similarity, to be
improved in order to foster mathematical reasoning in the classrooms. In this paper,
the focus of discussion is on the topic Simultaneous Equations.
The Details
Core content of your
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Research (methodology, results, analysis, limitations, etc.)
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or best practice (design, implementation, guidelines, etc.)
The team started by collaboratively planning the discourse that requires students'
reasoning to build the essential concepts in the lesson notes followed by peer
observations and post-lesson conferences. The observed lessons were also
videotaped to give learning opportunity for teachers to further analyse the discourse
generated as well as a means for self-reflection of own lessons. Through rounds of
peer observations, the various key questions pertaining to the essential concepts
were refined. These helped the teachers to better manage the class discussion
discourse and helped the students to discover the concepts on their own instead of
teacher’s direct dissemination of information or concepts. The design for concept
attainment also involves advice and input from CPDD Math Unit consultant.
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HC-NY IP Ed Conference 2015
The Bottom Line
Figure 1 shows the various strategies that the teachers employed in the same
lessons, to facilitate the student discussion on attaining conceptual understanding of
solving simultaneous equations. After each observation, the teachers’ focus was
refining their strategies to make it efficient in facilitating the discourse.
Figure 1: Various Sec 2 teachers’ strategies in facilitating students’ discussion on the
concept attainment of Solving Simultaneous Equations
The summary of teachers’ experiences in this cycle is as follow:
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A lot of time taken for building students’ understanding of Cartesian
Coordinates, hence most of the lesson time was taken up by this discussion.
None of the teachers managed to complete the lesson plan, hence it is
necessary to separate the discussion and the first point above into different
lessons.
Students were generally quick to give the anticipated responses, which
suggest that the discourse plan sufficiently give effective scaffolding for the
students to attain the intended conceptual understanding.
Given more time, the discourse would be richer and the students would reach
sound conclusion. This supports the second bullet point above on separation
of the discussion into different lesson.
The focus on the in-between cycle improvement is on creating time and space
for such discussion to happen.
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HC-NY IP Ed Conference 2015
Implications
Based on the experience of conducting a cycle of Lesson Study on Simultaneous
Equations, the team gained insight that the teaching of Simultaneous Equations
should be done after the teaching of Linear Graph and Quadratic Graph. This will
allow students to build solid foundation of the graphical approach, which assists the
development of conceptual understanding of Simultaneous Equations. Hence, based
on this review, the sequence of topics in 2015 is revised as follow:
Figure 2: Sequence of topics in 2015
This study shows that Lesson Study can be used for teachers to work collaboratively
in reviewing the curriculum design, which will be grounded on the practice on the
ground. The positive aspect of Lesson Study is all the process is done
collaboratively, and in-between cycles improvement gives immediate impact for the
teachers to try out different strategies after observing their colleagues. Further study
is needed to evaluate such effectiveness in terms of students’ learning experience.
References
Lewis, C. (2009). What is the nature of knowledge development in lesson study?
Educational Action Research, 17, 95–110.
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