Lesson Study Cycle 1

In this lesson study cycle, we wanted students to move from espousing their own personal opinions in content or text-based assignments to grounding their views in connections to the text. We hoped students could connect to readings and create opinions based on the content in conjunction with their funds of knowledge.

Click HERE to read more about my sources

Click HERE to read my Literature Synthesis

Planning

Our first PDSA cycle focused on asking students to make initial connections to an academic reading.

Our second PDSA cycle was about basic annotating of a text. Circle words you do not know, put a ? next to places you have a question, and an ! next to places in the reading you connect to.

Research Base

Social Studies as an Inquiry Process

This theme is about fundamentally shifting the paradigm of what it means to teach history content from passive reception of information to active processes of analysis and application and the means by which we use facilitate this experience.

Using Lesson Scaffolding to Develop Independent Learners

I believe students are much more capable of independent learning than we sometimes think or allow them to be. Through scaffolding and modeling, students have the capacity to be independent learners.

Role of Content Knowledge before Application

This last theme is about the necessary base of knowledge before students can meaningfully apply that content knowledge to an essay or project or independently practice a skill.

Goals

Research Theme: Find ways to empower students to analyze their reactions and experiences with texts through extracting meaningful evidence to communicate their understanding and opinions.

Content Goal: Students will understand the content of one of the major founding documents, the Bill of Rights, of American civilization. They will be able to recognize the importance of annotating in the margins of a text to deeper understand the content, which will be demonstrated through a formal assessment: a completed tweet.

California Social Studies Standards: SSCS. 8.2.6 Enumerate the powers of government set forth in the Constitution and the fundamental liberties ensured by the Bill of Rights.

Lesson Flow

Students transition from independent reading to the assignment
Students are instructed to read, annotate, and decode certain amendments in the Bill of Rights
Students are assigned amendments based on where they are sitting at each table
Students then read independently their amendments and decode the amendments using Thesaurus.com. They were instructed to annotate and interact with the text in a way that felt natural to them.
After they decode and annotate their amendments, students share with their table what their amendment said. They capture their thinking on a small poster paper.
Students watch a video explaining each amendment and are instructed to star amendments they decoded and understood correctly.
Lastly, students use 1 amendment from the Bill of Rights to create a Tweet.

Read more on our Lesson Memorialization Document

How it Went

In terms of lesson design, we could have had better scaffolds that kept students engaged the entirety of the lesson. For example, on the graphic organizer, we could have put a section below each amendment for students to put their simplified language of the amendment they worked on and a section for them to write down the simplified language of the other amendments their peers worked on. We could have better modeled how to get the gist of a portion of text and how to synthesize their understanding. There could have been more checks for comprehension. Students were assigned 2-3 amendments based on which card they sat at, so all of the diamonds could have reviewed 6 and 7 with one another to ensure they all understood correctly what the amendments say before they shared with their table mates who had different cards. Lastly, we could have provided mentor tweets to the students to see what we were expecting from them as well as more time to complete this portion of the task.

In terms of assessing the success of the content goal, I do not know if students had a deep understanding of the Bill of Rights. I do not pedagogically believe we can assess this after doing a close reading of a text and asking students immediately to synthesize their knowledge. Understanding happens over the course of weeks not a singular lesson. I do not believe students recognized the importance of annotating rather annotated because the task required them to do it. I also do not believe we can begin to assess whether or not students use marginalia naturally or if it deepens their understanding because we didn't pre-assess their usage nor survey them about how it helped them in understanding the language of the Bill of Rights.

Observation and Student Data

Observing students was an invaluable experience. We got to see how students interact with an assignment from start to finish, how they respond to redirection and challenges, and how students collaboratively engage with a task. I saw my focal student take many breaks but achieve satisfactory comprehension of their assigned content. I need to trust that even if students are not doing every step that they are engaging in the ways that allow them to. I also need to be more forgiving in my own classroom with distractions and unrelated conversations, adults are not singly focused on a task silently for extended periods of time and it's okay that students are not always silent. Life in a classroom is good.

My general observations of how students interacted with the work:

All students engaged sincerely and to the best of their abilities with a complex task. There were no blank papers.
All students had at least 1 noticing about their assigned amendment.
Most students used Theseaurus.com to assist them in decoding the language of their assigned amendment to better understand what it meant. This was by far the most effective element of our lesson.
In terms of the tweet, the work they produced would have been more aligned with our vision and students would have better met the expectations with more time and a comprehension check from their peers or teacher.

Focal Student 1

Assets: They love to share their ideas with the class, has strong analysis skills, very capable of articulating their ideas.

Needs: seeing the reason to do work, showing their thinking and work, getting emotional when stuck, trusting adults.

Observing them

Focal Student 1 (FS1) took time to get engaged with the assignment and engaged intermittently. They looked for music a lot on their phone and wondered if it was a processing mechanism.

They were very suspicious of me and I wonder if this student was deterred by my observation and if they would have engaged if I were participating in facilitating the lesson.

They did participate in the whole class discussion and in their small group discussion.

Further Observation Notes can be found HERE

Their annotations

They noticed the grammar and structure of their assigned amendments. They did not decode the language. Their marginalia was primarily asking what something meant. There was a disconnect there between the exercise and how they interacted but they demonstrated a strong synthesis of what the amendment meant without decoding. And their amendments were more complex.

Reflection

I have learned so much from this lesson study cycle. The biggest takeaway is the process that builds into the lesson study. I don't believe I was grounded in what was being asked of us until the very end. Each step of the way has felt disjointed and my frustration festered because I was lost and didn't know how to get on the same page. My honest opinion of our lesson is that it lacked clarity, direction, and did not serve as a meaningful exercise in understanding our focal students or deepening their understanding of the content. I don't believe that our lesson integrated the research done to better develop the lesson plan. The honest reflection of what our lesson failed to incorporate is less about choosing to not integrate and more about the process of development in the lesson cycle. In the next cycle I aim to be more present and intentional with the initial idea so that I can be attentive in my own classroom, considerate in the planning and research, and aware when executing the actual lesson study.

In this cycle, I believe our overarching goal was too broad and unmeasurable. We sought for students to offer opinions that bridged their existing schema and opinions with the content they learned. We used the term "connections" liberally. Connections are something good readers make upon reading a text because they enable us to understand. When a reader connects with a piece of text and can relate it to an experience they have either had or seen, they can begin to develop empathy and awareness. Students do not always make connections when reading nor do they understand the task when a teacher asks for connections with the text. Students need modeling and more pointed questions to develop the habit of connecting with text. I believe we took this for granted because we did not model that nor seek to know their opinions on topics and see how they changed once they had engaged with the text. Moreover, I believe we misnamed connections for funds of knowledge.

In the lesson itself we did not ask students for their connections explicitly to the Bill of Rights. We asked them to relate an amendment of the Bill of Rights to something relevant to that amendment as a means to see if students understood how to apply the Bill of Rights in context. Some students borrowed from personal experiences, some students used related academic examples, some misunderstood the application of the Bill of Rights.

To be more specific, we need to narrow our focus and better prepare students to accomplish our goals. We need to be explicit in our instruction of skill building like annotations and connections. Skills and content knowledge take considerable time to develop. We could scaffold assignments to help students engage with one another during group work and naturally add elements to graphic organizers or note catchers that require students to listen to one another to better foster collaboration and development of collective genius.

Some questions I am asking myself are:

How can I be more present in the midst of not seeing the whole picture? And see value in the portion of the whole I do see?

How can the time in a lesson be meaningful and how can each step of the way be more purposeful?