Lesson Study (Collaborative Inquiry)

Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) is a collaborative, cyclical form of teacher professional development and practitioner inquiry that originated in Japan. A team of teachers studies the curriculum, sets a shared learning goal, jointly designs a 'research lesson,' has one member teach it while the others observe students closely, and then debriefs against the evidence to revise the lesson and their understanding of teaching. Rather than improving a single lesson, its deeper aim is to build teachers' professional knowledge through disciplined, evidence-based collective inquiry.