School-wide Lesson Study: John Muir Elementary School
John Muir Elementary School, in San Francisco Unified School District, began its school-wide lesson study journey in 2015. Muir School shows up as a “positive outlier” in district scans–a site that has been extraordinarily successful in supporting the achievement of underserved groups.
Overview
In 2015, Muir Elementary began to grow its lesson study work school-wide, focusing on Teaching Through Problem-solving in mathematics. Muir’s mathematics standardized test scores from 2015-19 are shown below, by student subgroup. The black lines show SFUSD results for comparison.
*Information from the California Department of Education http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest
Muir School serves 225 students; school demographics are shown below.
What has allowed John Muir Elementary to close the achievement gap? Some distinguishing features of the school’s work include
- Educators use lesson study to build, enact and refine a common vision of good practice
- Teaching approaches emphasize student agency–for example, mathematics is taught through problem-solving
- Teacher leaders deepen expertise through SFUSD’s teacher fellow network
