 Lesson study can take lots of different forms in different projects. The way our current project is organized is a teacher is signing up for an intensive one-year commitment. And other teachers have the opportunity to participate in some of the project's activities over the course of that year, but aren't involved in the lesson study aspect. So over the course of the year, we start off in the summertime, we bring in three historians. One historian does a focus on the legal and political history of the theme that we're exploring. Another, the social history, a third, the economic history of that theme. Then I work with two teachers, two professors from the University of Portland, and they're focusing on historical thinking and literacy needs of students and strategies to help students engage with that. Teachers begin the process of planning a lesson during that one week summer institute. Then in the fall, they get together for a couple of evenings and further plan out their lesson, further consider other strategies, and then they do a demonstration lesson in the fall. In the spring, we start up again with the addition of a trip. We do a week-long history on location study of the historical theme, and then follow up with another part of the lesson study cycle in the spring. We also have a variety of events with historians over the course of the year connected to the theme, including one with a local partner that focuses on the regional connection to that theme. In lesson study, the ideal size for a group is about four to six participants. However, we have had groups which for different reasons have had fewer or have had more, but it seems as though four to six is the right number of participants for a lesson study group. We've played with our approach in response to the feedback that teachers have given us in response to the evaluation that we've received from our third party evaluator. In our previous project, lesson study was written into our proposal, but it wasn't budgeted, and lesson study is something that requires having substitutes for all teachers involved when the demonstration lessons happen. We worked with professional learning teams and a professional learning team structure of collegial inquiry and collaborative work, but without a true lesson study of writing a lesson together and observing the lesson. In this new grant that we're in right now, which we're in the second year of, we've been able to embed it fully into it because it was in there in the planning stages and on the budget page. The last year we did a single lesson study cycle with teachers. What we found was that we really wanted to do two lesson study cycles with teachers, assuming that a group comes together more fully after having done it through once and will be able to maximize and have a more enhanced experience the second time around. The organization of lesson study teams can happen in many different ways. One way that it can happen is geography. So again, I'm working in with a project that deals with teachers through a very large geographic zone. So sometimes we'll organize teachers based on within a district or based on within a school. Other times it goes based on interest or familiarity with each other. Other times people just fall into each other's arms. We've tried it different ways. We'll continue to try it different ways. We have had mixed results with the idea of lesson study teams being organized outside of assignment areas. What is important is that everybody who's on the planning team has a vested interest in creating a lesson that they can use in their classroom. That can happen across assignment areas. If one person in the group teaches Washington State history and another person teaches U.S. history, they can write a lesson together that gets tweaked a little bit for the one setting and a little bit for the other setting. Likewise in vertical age groups, you can have a team with fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade teachers if they're looking at the same historical idea but thinking about that across a developmental range. And so they can tweak it. What doesn't work is when a teacher says, well, that's not really what I teach. So I'll participate in this. I'll give it my best effort. But it's not really what I teach so I'm not going to go anywhere with it. It's not mine. What people need to feel is ownership about the lesson.