Lesson Study in the Netherlands

Lesson Study NL

The consortium Lesson Study NL (http://www.lessonstudynl.nl/) was founded in 2016 by dr. Sui Lin Goei (VU Amsterdam/Windesheim University), dr. Siebrich de Vries (University of Groningen) and dr. Nellie Verhoef (University of Twente). As teacher educators they share a passion for professional development of (student) teachers with Lesson Study. They work at university teacher education institutes and are affiliated with school innovation through research projects involving Lesson Study. They view Lesson Study as a leverage for improving the quality of education in the Netherlands and worldwide. To date, together they supervise more than six PhD students in their process of validating Lesson Study for the Dutch educational context.

All partner universities have national funded projects on Lesson Study or are using Lesson Study as a professional development tool in their projects. They wrote the first Dutch practitioner guide on Lesson Study (De Vries, Verhoef & Goei, 2016) and train Lesson Study facilitators. The consortium Lesson Study NL is the initiator and organiser of the yearly Dutch National Lesson Study Conference. They have strong ties in the international Lesson Study community. In 2018, Utrecht University was added as a fifth partner to Lesson Study NL. Moreover, Lesson Study NL collaborates with colleagues of NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Nijmegen University, Amsterdam University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Noteworthy are the university-school partnerships in which schools and universities have collaborated to establish Lesson Study in the Netherlands.

At present, the Lesson Study approach has gained momentum in the Netherlands in the last decade and welcomes an ever-increasing community of (student) teachers, teacher educators and researchers to share their experiences and outcomes. For this conference we are pleased to share with the international community the success of our university-school partnerships in which we collaboratively implement Lesson Study, study its sustainable implementation in schools and have adopted a train-the-trainer model through which new and sustainable Lesson Study craftsmanship has been created. The aim is to contribute to the process of Lesson Study becoming a worldwide established way of working – an organisational routine – in schools for sustainable change.