Research Lesson Study: a handbook for teacher-, school- and system-leaders.​

Research Lesson Study (RLS) is a variant of lesson study developed by former WALS President Peter Dudley. 
It was first developed with UK teachers and school leaders between 2000 and 2005 to create a model that could be used in an English schools-system context. As a result it introduces elements such as: 
  • A dialogic ‘Teacher Talk Protocol’ designed to create safe professional space where teachers, leaders and expert practitioners can work together to create new practice knowledge by thinking together in contexts of lesson study
  • A sequence of two or three research lessons
  • A lesson study group of two or three teachers who conduct and analyse their research lessons before making them public to colleagues, local educators or beyond
  • A focus on all students – but also on specific ‘case students’ that helps to develop our noticing skills and allows the professional blind spots we develop as teachers to be revealed to us through collaborative planning and post-lesson discussion
  • A deliberate practice that enables our invisible, tacit knowledge  to become ‘seeable’ and as a result: changeable.
These elements have been adopted in many lesson study practices that have since developed across the UK, Europe and Central Asia. RLS is also one of the most widely evaluated forms of lesson study in a number of large-scale studies conducted in the UK and Japan between 2011 and 2023. These collectively show that RLS is popular with teachers and leaders, helps to raise standards and to improve learning and schools and has the potential to close attainment gaps between under-achieving student-groups and all students. 
 
The RLS handbook is available in 8 languages. The sixth (2025) edition of the Dialogic Lesson Study Handbook can be downloaded from the Camtree (Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange) platform at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. This version supports teacher-leaders, school leaders and system leaders to conduct research lesson studies and share their findings and co-evolved practices with their colleagues, supporting teachers to publish their lesson study reports in the Camtree library where they can be used by teachers around the world. This handbook also provides additional guidance on analysing students’ ‘exploratory talk’ in research lessons.
 
Camtree (https://camtree.org/) was co-founded by Pete Dudley and exists to support, promote, publish, curate, and synthesise teacher research for the benefit of the profession; to help create new professional knowledge; and to benefit education policy-formation which in most countries is seldom informed by research conducted by teachers themselves. 
 
The link to the new sixth edition is below. 
Download Handbook
If you are interested in using its accompanying Workbook to guide your lesson study and notetaking, Camtree can help transform your lesson study notes into a draft report and a draft structured abstract of which you an your colleagues are authors and can then edit and add any additional information you feel is needed before you submit it for publication on the Camtree platform at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. This information can be found in the handbook itself.
 
Earlier editions of the handbook exist in Spanish, Turkish, Russian, German, Kazakh, Bahasa, Welsh and English and are available from https://lessonstudy.co.uk/