Lesson Study Cycle 2

Our lesson study group is composed of middle school teachers. The focus for this second cycle is about equity and moving our teaching to be aligned with culturally responsive pedagogy as outlined by Gloria Ladson-Billings. She provides three interconnected principles of CRP: students experience academic success through clearly communicated high learning expectations that are met with suitable instruction, students expand and maintain cultural competence through affirmation of their cultural background and exploration of other cultures, and development of a socio-political consciousness in which teachers foster awareness and teach translatable skills to address real problems in communities and broader systems.

We broadly were interested in how to increase academic agency in our classrooms, and decenter ourselves as teachers as sole authority on content and experts on how to accomplish a task. Our first task was to define agency, then understand the pedagogical structures necessary to build that in our classrooms, and find instructional practices that move from philosophy to action for our students. Through a lot of detours and dead-ends, we landed on a lesson that studied academic discussion.

Research and Goals

Our research focused on the concept of agency in classrooms. We can define agency as the means by which students are engaged in reflecting on their learning and sharing that knowledge with the intention of reforming their educational spaces. Some fundamental ways teachers can cultivate agency in their classrooms are through class discussions, reflection, content and work that students are interested in, and seeing one another as living experts on content.

A number of the articles we read referenced small group discussions centered around questions with real-world significance was an instructional practice that increased student agency. Discussion enables students to be the voices of authority on topics. We wanted to see how students participate in discussion and how they developed ideas in collective settings.

For more information on the sources we used to shape our thinking, here is my Annotated Bibliography and Literature Synthesis.

Problem of Practice: How do we get students to value each other?

Research Theme: We will establish classroom cultures that emphasize caring for, listening to, and learning from one another.

Equity Goal: Students will participate in classroom discussions and all voices will be heard.

If you’d like to know more about the whole lesson, please check out our Memorialization Document.

Some Pit Stops before the Lesson Study

Change Idea

Our change idea aligned with annotation instructions. We were interested to see how students engaged with a task once with explicit annotation strategies and if they would do it again on their own. We were also interested in understanding how the annotation directions helped them access and understand the content.

PDSA Cycle 1

We engaged students in how and why questions to help them further their thinking, explain the concepts, and demonstrate their ability to understand in a broader context. The intention was to help students cultivate care for the process and reason for a phenomena.

Knowledgable Other

Our knowledgable other was Britt Perro, an 8th grade Humanities teacher from HTMNC. She provided us with ideas about how to engage students in collaborative work, dialogue, and demonstrating content. She helped us design our original lesson for lesson study.

Lesson Study Overview

Our change idea and PDSA cycles did not directly lead us to our lesson study topic or instructional practice. We used the change ideas and the PDSA cycles to see what we wanted to focus on. Our Knowledgable Other provided direction and clarity for us on our research lesson.

We initially planned to do a discussion about the identities of the peoples persecuted in the Salem Witch Trials. The classroom in which the lesson was being hosted experienced a number of events that made the lesson unsafe for students to engage with. In a last minute adjustment, we used the base of the lesson, a discussion and use of a discussion web protocol, and transformed it for book club groups. The host teacher gave students time to do their book club discussions and then provided students with a discussion question in which they were to discuss the merits of a yes answer and a no answer with their book clubs. The students were to come to a consensus on the question.

Content Understanding Goal:

Lesson Hypothesis: If we employ discussion webs to support pair and small group consensus making with sentence starters for engaging with peers’ ideas while students are discussing a broad question related to their book club books, then students will improve their capacity to value each other’s ideas as evidenced by asking follow up questions or referencing each others’ ideas during discussions.

How it Went and Wonderings

The group I observed did not go through the protocol of book club because half of the students were not prepared. I wonder what checks were in place to ensure that students were prepared for the book club? I also wonder how teachers can cultivate a sense of ownership over the roles students were assigned so that students have a desire to come prepared to book club or how we can create a sense of onus to get the work done for the sake of the group members? Beyond students coming prepared, I thought the role of facilitator could have better structures to reach the full potential of a student moderated discussion rather than checking the boxes.

A majority of book club groups got to the consensus we asked of them. We are concerned about how students got to that consensus. We do not believe that students engaged in a discussion about the “right” answer to the questions posed to their groups; rather students jumped to one answer without building on each other’s thinking, just listing the reasons one answer was in fact right. I’m not sure the graphic organizer of the discussion web provided enough structure to necessitate a dialogue. Moreover, the teachers could have modeled what we were looking for. We could have provided students with sentence starters to give them the vocabulary to build off one another's thinking which is something we said we'd do but somehow didn't make it from the initial lesson we planned to the lesson we delievered. We also could have given each of the student's a handout that asked them what ideas they had initially and independent think time to fill that section out, and a section that asked them what they heard from their peers. What other structures could be practiced to encourage and better facilitate discussion that builds off one anothers’ thinking rather than singular thoughts being shared in the group?

Something we could have done from the outset of the lesson study was measure student perception of their agency and how discussion made the students feel. Moreover, we could have measured how students felt about the lesson and how they engaged after the lesson was over. We could have a better indication if students felt agency in their book clubs, in their roles, in discussion circles and what that meant to them. We needed student input to have a better understanding of the effects of the lesson and the intentions built into it.

After the students did the activity, the book club I was observing started talking about the best Arizona Iced Tea flavors. Students built off each other’s flavors, and said things like, “but have you tried this one…” and “Oh that one is really sweet…” It was the only moment in 50 minutes that I observed all the students engaged in the conversation– listening and contributing. I wonder how we can use these connections to build into academic conversations. Because they have the fundamental skills here of dialogue, just not the content. The conversation about iced tea flavors is an easy hook but how do we translate that into academic content? It is proof that students need questions that they care deeply about and see themselves in, but not all content provides that level of access. How can we bridge this moment into academic topics? Do we start all discussions with a more personal question that students can engage with and then transition into the academic discussion?

Observation and Student Data

Focal Student 1

Assets: Extremely creative and has a lot of possibilities for their work which they express verbally one on one.

Growth: Has trouble transferring their thoughts to assignment competition. They typically have challenges following along with the flow of the activities, and as a result tend to withdraw and not attempt work.

Observing them

Focal Student 1 (FS1) was not prepared for book club but sought to contribute to the conversation. They offered quotes they liked in the chapter but did not expand on why they were thought-provoking.

They were more engaged in the consensus making discussion. They had a particularly strong opinion on the question and wanted to get their ideas down as fast as possible. I suspect to not forget them.

Further Observation Notes can be found HERE

Their contributions to book club and discussion

Their job was to be an illuminator. The illuminator picked important quotes and explained why they picked them. They had not yet picked their quotes when book club had started so they worked through the other procedures and missed what their peers offered in relation to the book. When they offered their quotes, they used the language of the text and explained why the quote was meaningful to the broader message of the book. Nobody responded to their contributions.

This was a pattern I noticed as well in the discussion web activity. Students offered ideas for the activity but students would not engage with one another about the ideas.

In terms of the discussion web, my focal student participated in creating one of the arguments. There was a demonstrated interest in engaging with the work. They offered historical context and tried to get the boys at the table to engage. This focal student was really motivated to come up with the most right answer to the question.

Reflection

The process has taken us on a lot of twists and turns. We’ve gone down one way and it’s been a dead end. Another way and it’s a heck of a mountain to climb. Another way to a cliff. I wish we were people who saw the beauty in this process but I think we’ve each come to the conclusion that it felt aimless. We also as a group have been experiencing a number of hardships both personally and professionally that certainly contributed to a difficult cycle. This will probably be a constant so how do we create space for ourselves to be reflective and present practitioners?

I’ve been soliciting a lot of feedback on my teaching practice. What has become apparent is that I don’t have the proper training to serve students in my classroom, particularly around phonics and students with ADHD. Moreover, I have felt a tension between meeting certain standards and projects that may be more engaging because they are more personal to students. I would assume that most of the first few years of building a teaching practice is realizing how far you are from the goals. And how much needs to be done to have an effective classroom. There is a constant stream of self-doubt. I’ve left so many class sessions defeated and I wonder how lesson study could be an affirming space rather than a deficit-based space.

And I wonder how lesson study could address the actual deficits in my classroom to make me a better teacher in my first year. It has felt at times that I am reaching for the aspiration, the end, but the process of here to there is a ravine I am not yet ready to endeavor upon. It’s not a hop, skip and a jump. It’s a process, and I wonder how lesson study could be better scaffolded to see the beginning and the steps it takes to get to the end goal of say something like the critical responsive pedagogy rubric. If a lesson does not yet have 3 or more means of differentiated expression of learning, how do we incorporate 2? I’ve been working since August to get students to demonstrate a connection they have plus why they connect to it. And frankly it isn’t that successful, so what are ways I can better support creating those real-world and personal connections?

I’m sure much of this falls on me and my lesson-study teams to have a better process to address the holes in the classroom. So in the next lesson study cycle, I hope I can double down and implement measures that will increase student agency. I hope to use Chapter 5 of Street Data to first assess student agency, then do the agency interviews with students who feel agency and students divorced from that sense of agency, then work through the steps to create the agency they outline. I want to decenter the singularity of the lesson study and emphasize the practices necessary to measure student agency in a singular lesson.