I have always been a ‘fly by the seat kind of guy’ so at first, the concept of a lesson study seemed pointless to me. This viewpoint changed slightly however, once I realized how effective it was to have other people look over the lesson that you plan to teach.
Grouping up a fellow student who held a similar lesson was an incredibly informative experience, and I learned a number of things that would never have occured to me if I simply wrote up my lesson and then presented it. I plan on modifying my already existing lesson plan to include the tips and advice that was given to me during this time. Unfortunately, once we stopped our one on one meetings the overall concept began to drag. Far too much time was spent simply listening to other groups talking, and many times they were talking about lessons that had no common ground with my own, and while there was some discussion between multiple groups I feel as though there could have been more. One way this could have improved was to space out student presentations, or simply stop them after 5 or so minutes, that way we would not have been overwhelmed by what was going on.
I do think that working with peers is a very effective way to improve our lessons (as seen through my lesson improving during our one on one meetings) but I feel that working with peers, in the sense of an entire classroom, would have been much more effective if we were given a lesson before hand, made a lesson plan for that, and then discussed that all having something in common.
As an absolute overall, I think that this lesson gives a unique insight as to what many of us believe students should do, and while there are some that are more creative than others (tug of war for example) I believe that we are all desperately trying to convey history to our students in an active and engaging way that does not rely on simple and inane lecturing, One other aspect that comes to light due to this lesson is the dedication of each student teacher, it becomes obvious from listening each person speak that they put true effort into their study, and that is a very heartening pattern to see.