 My name is Matt Carlson. I work at Educational Service District 112, which is a multi-district, multi-county service area in Southwest Washington State. We work with districts in about six counties, about 20 school districts, and this is the ESD's third Teaching American History grant. It's the second one that I've been involved with, and the title of this one is Causes of Conflict, Digging Deep to Understand American History, and a core component of that is the lesson study process. So in lesson study, a group of teachers come together, they decide on some targets that they want for their students, both short-term and long-range goals for their students. They plan a lesson fitting that target, develop a student question which is based around the idea of what do they want students to know over the course of that lesson, and a teacher question which is more about what do they want to learn about the teaching and learning of history through the course of the cycle. They write the lesson together and then one person from the group teaches the lesson while the rest of the people in the group observe the lesson being taught, and so the attention is not so much on the lesson because the people observing the lesson already know the lesson, not so much on the teacher but rather on the students and how the students are interacting with the activity itself. Each person in the room might be watching two or three or four students over the course of a lesson, then everybody gets together after the lesson is taught and debrief, kind of first talk about what they observed and what that suggests about whether or not students were able to answer the student question, what it suggests about the teacher question, and then look at any student artifacts that are created over the course of the lesson, written products or otherwise, and talk about what new insight they gather from that, and then talk about how the lesson might be revised to better deepen student learning over the course of that, and in turn what did they learn more generalizable ideas about teaching and learning over the course of the cycle. TAH is all about improving the instructional capacity of teachers, and one way to do that is to deepen teachers' content knowledge so that they know more about the material that they're trying to teach. What lesson study does is it includes that and then brings it all the way down to the classroom level, so that what's truly meaningful is not just what teachers learn for their own merit, but how teachers can then apply that in a way that really meets the needs of the students, and the teachers are the ones who are the ultimate arbiters of whether or not a strategy or an approach is successful, and it's based on how they saw students that interact with it.