By Tom

 I taught a pretty good lesson the other day, while trying to get my third graders to revise the rough drafts of their paragraphs.

I started by asking Audrey about her hair. Audrey has beautiful hair which is always combed into complicated arrangements. I asked her whether she used a mirror when she combed her hair each morning. She explained how she and her mom stand before the mirror, constantly making adjustments until it looks perfect. Like Audrey, most of my students are careful about their hair, and they could relate to our conversation.

I shifted the discussion to writing: Like hair, writing needs to be adjusted and revised until it looks perfect. I showed them what I was talking about. I projected a paragraph that they had watched me write the day before. I modeled adding details to my piece, switching words around, dividing sentences and combining ideas.

Then we put Taylor’s work up on the screen. I picked her paper because it was fairly well-written, yet presented several opportunities for revision. After we made a few changes to Taylor’s paper, I released the class to work on their own. They had seen me revise, they had practiced revising together and they were ready to work independently.

Most of them, anyway.  There were a few that I still had some concerns about, and I went to their desks first to help them clean things up.

After about ten minutes I told the class that as soon as their paragraphs were fully revised they could walk around and read other finished papers and write comments on the back to the authors.  After that we reviewed the main points about revising, put our work away and got ready for recess.

It was a good lesson. I took the class from one place to another. My students didn’t know how to revise their writing, and now they do. There was nothing particularly fancy about this lesson, nor was there anything seriously wrong with it. It was the kind of solid, meat-and-potatoes lesson that I’m expected to chunk out several times a day for the length of the school year. The kind of lesson that I love to teach.

And I think it’s about time the lesson got its due. The lesson, you see, is crucial; the smallest unit of education that still retains the complexity of teaching. It’s the main idea of school; the whole point. Teachers don’t teach students, their lessons do. A teacher is as good or as bad as the lessons he teaches. A school is as good or as bad as the lessons the teachers within that school are teaching.

School reform, if there really is such a thing, consists solely of lesson improvement. Lessons are the point of impact in which students meet their teachers, along with all the people and institutions that support their teachers.

We’re constantly hearing about school reform by way of accountability, school choice, merit pay and so on.  Rarely do we hear of school reform by way of lesson improvement, which is the only way it’ll ever happen. Oddly, not everyone seems to get this simple reality.

But some do.

Japan gets it. In that country, you cannot interrupt a teacher or her classroom in the middle of a lesson. They won’t let you. It would be like interrupting a surgeon in the middle of an operation. Or interrupting a second baseman in the middle of a double play. Furthermore, in Japan, the primary means of professional development is called Lesson Study. It’s astonishingly simple, yet incredibly powerful. Teams of teachers collaborate on the design of one lesson, a lesson that addresses a particular need within their student population. The spend hours on it, sometimes over the course of several months. They talk through everything; the questions they ask, the design of the work papers, the assessment piece, everything is up for discussion. When it’s finally ready, they pick one teacher to present it to a class and the others watch, taking detailed notes. Then they debrief and refine the lesson before adding it to the body of lessons that they’ve developed over time. Japanese teachers have been doing Lesson Study for seven decades. It’s part of their culture. And it works. Their education system improves over time, slowly and carefully.

The National Board gets it. The most important part of becoming National Board Certified is videotaping and writing about a handful of lessons. The National Board, composed primarily of teachers, understands that if you want to assess a teacher, you need to look carefully at the lessons she teaches. Because that’s what really matters. Content knowledge has its place, as does working with parents and other colleagues, but the lesson is, and should be, the primary focus.

Teachers get it. Teachers know about lessons. Any teacher knows that a good lesson is deceptively difficult to plan and execute. And any teacher knows what it feels like when you get it right. Any teacher knows what it’s like to help a group of students understand something important or become proficient at a useful skill. They understand how I felt while teaching that lesson on revision.

Most of us don’t get paid based on the quality of our lessons. Most of us don’t want to. I certainly don’t.

But when it’s all been said and done, all I really care about is the quality of my lessons.