Lesson Study Cycle One
As a lesson group, we wanted to identify what allowed for students to find writing “meaningful.” Specifically, we wanted to identify the conditions, qualities, and experiences that allow for students to find their interactions with writing meaningful and informative in the long-term. This question obviously has much more range, subjectivity, and nuance than we could address within one lesson study, so—while we kept that question as a guidepost—we focused our lesson on creating situations for authentic student writing to manifest. To achieve this, the lesson asked for 9th grade students from HTH to write postcards to 9th grade students at HTHMA. For our research, we focused on looking at how teacher acknowledgment of student skill plays a role in how invested students feel in writing as well as studies into the collaborative efforts across levels of education to teach to certain standards of writing preparedness.
Teaching Partners:
Felicia Acosta - 9th Grade Humanities
Chet Flaum - 9th Grade Humanities
Zak Sanders - 10th Grade Humanities
Robert Cross - 11th Grade Humanities
Part One: Planning
Goals
Equity Goal:
How do we make writing “meaningful” for students? What are the conditions, qualities, and experiences that allow for students to find their interactions with writing meaningful and informative in the long-term?
Content Goal:
By the end of this lesson, students will know how to write a postcard to another student that includes: information about themselves, data collected from the field trip to the neighboring school, and uses the proper register and format. Through writing to students of similar age and grade level, students will gain an authentic appreciation for writing.
Research Base
Throughout our lesson study planning phase, we did research on: student reception of delivered curriculum based on the acknowledgment of their experienced and learned curriculum; what students found most helpful and supportive from their high schools in regards to post-high school life; and the general breakdown of communication between secondary, post-secondary, and teaching institute instructors in what constitutes proper “writing preparedness goals.”
In regards to our problem of practice, the research allowed us to glean more insight into the conditions that encourage more student engagement with writing and, ideally, allow students to find deeper meaning and connection with writing as a whole. Largely, students want to feel like they have attained a level mastery and want that progress and effort to be acknowledged. They also want to feel that what they learn and master has larger implications and impact on their post-school life. This can be disrupted if teachers devalue past knowledge and experience they have, and when the material taught is no longer relevant (specifically in the transition between high school and college/career life).
Our initial findings based off the research, then, suggest that the way to make writing at least somewhat meaningful to students would be to: build off their prior knowledge and experience within the discourse; teach to writing preparedness goals that are universal between secondary and post-secondary education.
Read more in my R.A.R., R.R.R., and Annotated Bibliography
Focal Students
Focal Student #1
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Has a lot of potential
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Acts out who often blurts out in class and disrupts norms.
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Pillar of the classroom community.
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Need to find a point of intervention.
Focal Student #2
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Does great work
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Doesn't feel like they are engaged by the assignments.
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Looking for ways to adapt to meet their needs.
Focal Student #3
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Has a great attitude
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Consistently turning in incomplete work even though it often seems like they're on task.
Lesson Flow
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Discuss field trip rules and expectations
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Go on field trip to neighboring school
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walk around the school looking for a point of interest to ask questions about
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return to class
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Debrief field trip
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Share next steps and instructions for creating and writing postcard
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half the class writes for 30 minutes, the other draws postcard
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switch
PDSA Data
Lesson Slides
Check out the lesson slides
Part Two: How it Went and Student Work
Student Work
Reflection
Overall, the lesson went decently well. Students mostly behaved on the field trip and took note of something that caught their interest to write about—however, it’s worth noting that there was a trend of students choosing the first thing that they saw and the topic used as the example (i.e., the masks). There was also a lesson to be learned about how to best deal with assigning pen pals. We randomized them all, but we did give them the option to switch with each other if both parties agreed and got permission from the teacher. This lead to the situation where a decent amount of students spent their work time trying to trade others for their friends at the neighboring school. The solution will be to either: limit the amount of time they have to trade; do not allow trading at all; have them use pen names so they don’t know who the other person is; have them avoid using names at all.
There is also the issue that, while we did collect student work, we forgot to provide a survey. Clearly, this is something to change next time. The lack of that data makes it hard to further comment on how authentic/enjoyable/meaningful this assignment was for the students working on this assignment. The focal students didn’t supply assignments for us to critique, so it’s hard to gauge how well this assignment impacted them. From the samples provided, students seemed invested in the work, but that’s hardly empirical data.
What I have learned from this research aspect of this lesson study is that to make writing hold value long-term for students, there needs to be an acknowledgement of their knowledge, experience, and use for the topic. It also needs to be something they feel that they can cultivate without feeling like they’ve wasted time and effort. I’d love to continue working on this question in further lesson studies. It feels like there is still a lot to test and experiment with in terms of making writing “meaningful.” I’ve also learned the value of collecting your own data/redundancy of data as a failsafe to ensure that it’s held somewhere. It may seem like a simple step to miss, but I’m glad that the lesson was learned in the first cycle.