Lesson Study Cycle Three
As a lesson group, we wanted to identify how we could build an equitable classroom through restoration of student-centered norms and incorporation of counternarratives. Specifically, we wanted to determine how we could address issues where students would use discussions of any sensitive topic as an excuse to call out or fling problematic attributions to other students without using that situation as a basis for conversation. Our concerns were that by focusing on the targeted student, we would inadvertently put that student in the middle of addressing the problematic nature of what happened. This is a vast question to address within one lesson study, so, while that was the guiding question, we narrowed down the focus to how we could best build frameworks for conversations about difficult and sensitive topics and set the groundwork for ultimately introducing counter narratives to the discussion. To achieve this, the lesson asked for two separate things: The first was a norming congress that made the students recreate and determine their own norms; the second was an activity that asked for students to work on what went into making assumptions or “narratives” so that they could learn how to deconstruct what the narrative creation process.
Teaching Partner:
Cliff Ridenour - 7th Grade Humanities
Part One: Planning
Goals
Equity Goal: How can we, as critical teachers, emphasize intersectionality and equity in the classroom without solely exemplifying students? In other words, how do we invite students to share their experiences without turning them into targets of harassment and bullying?
Content Goal: By the end of the lesson, students will understand how counter narratives disrupt the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes and have the necessary skills to use their knowledge of history to portray their own counter narrative about gaming and gambling addiction.
Research Base
Throughout our lesson study planning phase, we did research on: The history of counter narratives and their implementation in education; Critical Race Theory as a point of origin for counter narratives; safety as a potential construct of conformation, punishment, and normalization; safe space creation for students of marginalized identities; and social justice education.
In regards to the problem of practice, the research allowed us to determine some of what was necessary to start building equity in the classroom so that students could feel safe leaving their comfort zone and engage with not only content that was sensitive but also points of view that directly challenge their previously held conceptions. We learned the importance of counter narratives as a form of uplifting marginalized voices with the intent to specifically fight back systemic injustices within the court of law and how they eventually began being used in educational capacities to deconstruct bigoted, problematic, hegemonic narratives. It was also stated, though, that counter narratives are best learned experientially rather than didactically. We also learned the importance of creating norms that were student-centered and student-dictated to ensure all students felt seen and safe. Our research evidenced multiple cases in which safety was leveraged as a cudgel to enforce forms of normalcy and conformity.
Our initial findings indicated that counter narratives were a good route to take to help address the general content and nature of the things being thrown out in the classroom, and due to the necessity of them being engaged with as applicable and experientially, restructuring the norms to ensure all students felt heard and safe would be a good way to allow for said experiences to be as fruitful as we desired.
Read more in my R.A.R, Annotated Bibliography, and Literature Synthesis
Focal Students
Focal Student #1
⁃ a central figure in the classroom emotionally and socially
⁃ Both a target of and user of problematic narratives
⁃ Enjoys engaging with lesson content
Focal Student #2
⁃ Struggles to engage with work and lessons
⁃ Predominantly user of problematic narratives
Lesson Flow
⁃ Show slides introducing the iceberg concept
⁃ Discuss the different depth levels of asking questions about something (gut reaction, level one, level two, level three)
⁃ Hand out worksheet and quotes
⁃ have students ask questions about the quotes in various levels of depth (scaffolded and done as a class)
⁃ Ask students to make an assumption based on their quote
⁃ Discuss what they thought about the assumption they made and what they felt about it.
PDSA Data
Lesson Slides
Check out the lesson slides
Part Two: How it Went, Student Data, and Student Work
Student Work
Student Data
Student Survey Data about their reception to reading, writing, and using mentor texts
Reflection
Overall, it is hard to discern how the lesson went. There are a few different reasons for this. The first is that this lesson study was made up of a few different lessons (hard to track how one lesson went when there were multiple little lessons); the second is that the goal of the lesson study isn’t something that will show fruitful results immediately—there is no “this worked and here it is” result. This latter point is not to say we didn’t get smaller results, but they aren’t enough to definitively claim that our approach is full-proof, 100% effective, or even necessary in its entirety.
To address the first point, the lesson study had two major parts: the norming congress and the narrative creation activity. The first was a lesson staggered over a couple days where students would work in groups to come up with the norms they wanted for the class, display them as a part of a gallery walk, and ultimately cote on which norms they collectively agreed on (per class). Then, those norms were pulled together and each group had to present their reasons for why they wanted the norms, and there needed to be a unanimous consent in the classroom to add the norm to the list. This whole activity went alright, although there were plenty of instances of students bullying and breaking norms in front of the gallery when that aspect of the activity was happening (simply one example to show the collective disconnect between what they said they wanted and how they acted). Even then, it took time for the norms to be adapted and for them to take effect (not on the teacher level but simply as a matter of the class getting used to them). Ultimately, they did start being effective with reminders of the norms during moments when students failed to uphold them. (One of the noticeable differences was viewing the classes before the norms were enacted and after). However, despite this, the data is more noticings and apocryphal than hard data, and the type of data that could conclusively show the efficacy of the norming congress would take much longer than six weeks to gather.
When it came to the narrative activity, the goal was to introduce students to the process of deconstructing narratives by having them engage in the process of asking deeper and deeper questions about quotes from the class text out of context (which is Ready Player One). The idea is that by having them ask progressively deeper and deeper questions and have them talk about what they are feeling and where their own questions are coming from, they can slowly start to see how to apply this process to other narratives and “quotes” that they encounter in other contexts. This activity kind of worked. They did well with the gut reactions, level one, two, and three. They became quite uncomfortable when we asked them to make a baseless assumption about the quote (we wanted to push them to feel a bit uncomfortable here). The issue arose in the design process when we intentionally avoided asking them to consider how the quotes could relate to them and their own experiences as we didn’t want to open the door to people shutting down preemptively or being vulnerable to targeted call outs. The result is that students failed to find relevance to their own lived experiences and actually ended up making jokes about the quotes and specifically making fun of a student as a joke. After that, sharing went way down. A lot of students had thoughts worth sharing, but engagement went down after that. While we can’t say for certain that this problem would have been avoided otherwise, by removing the student experience from this activity, we removed any immediate care about the severity of the topic. The result ended up being what we feared. The next time we do this activity, it may be best just to expect that issue to arise and use it as a learning opportunity and hope that we generate deeper and more fruitful conversation.