Cycle 1 - Annotated Bibliography

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Lewis, C. C., & Hurd, J. (2011). Lesson study step by step: How teacher learning communities improve instruction. Heinemann, 6-17.

This chapter served as the introduction to the practice of Lesson Study. According to Lewis and Hurd, “lesson study places teachers in an active role as researchers (p. 7).” The lesson study approach creates a space for teachers to apply the practice changes they generate through group discussion directly to their classroom. This process allowed our research team to attempt implementation of new strategies in their own ways. Each of us faces different challenges in our individual classrooms that will inform the anticipatory planning of the other teachers in our research group. As Lewis and Hurd said, “Lesson study assumes that teachers need opportunities to work with colleagues to bring the standards to life in actual lessons, carefully study the student thinking that results, and revisit the meaning and approach to the standard in light of actual instruction (p. 9).” Specifically, in our own lesson study cycles, another teacher was implementing our change idea ahead of me. Her experience with her own class made us aware of some potential challenges with our plan, which allowed me to make the changes in my own practice. The article also provided specific questions for teachers to look at the implementation of ideas through a critical lens.

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Lewis, C. C., & Hurd, J. (2011). Lesson study step by step: How teacher learning communities improve instruction. Heinemann, 43-56.

This chapter served to make me aware of what to expect of the lesson study process, and informed my thinking about how to approach a lesson study. It additionally provided me with inspiration for how students would interact with content and display their own thinking during this unit of lessons. This chapter included a closer look at the use of the black board in the classroom by Makoto Yoshida. They define the blackboard “not simply as a place to casually jot down important messages that they want the students to remember, but a tool to help organize student thinking and discussion to enhance the learning experience (p. 67).” For the Touch of History unit I displayed a collection of propaganda on the black board, which students would continue to interact with in various ways over the course of the week. It will also serve as the centerpiece of our gallery walk when students display their final writing product and share their thinking with their peers. The chapter also pointed out a key challenge that teachers face in developing their own practice, “the danger of being overwhelmed by research and theory of unknown clinical relevance (p. 68).” Lesson study “provid[es] a practical setting for identifying and trying out the information needed to solve a problem (p. 68).” The article also warns that lesson study can be a bit scary because it forces us to accept that the exact answer to our question may not be the easiest thing to find. It requires a close examination of not just student thinking and work, but also our own practice and approaches. There is also a chance that in the end there will be more questions than you started with. But it also highlights the greatest asset of lesson study, the collaboration of other teachers in your exploration of practice.

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Monte-Sano, C., De La Paz, S., & Felton, M. K. (2015). Teaching argument writing and "content" in diverse middle school classrooms. Social Education, 79(4), 194–199.

Our research team decided to focus on developing students' evidence based writing skills, and focused on finding strategies, techniques, and protocols to aid in this development. The article “Teaching Argument Writing and ‘Content’ in Diverse Middle School History Classrooms,” served to introduce us to a potential way to approach developing our students’ evidence based writing skills. More than that, this article provided some guidance and thought provoking points regarding modeling. This is a teaching skill that I am hoping to develop over the course of this school year. In this article, Monte-Sano, De La Paz, and Felton, emphasize that what has been perceived as “content” in the past now includes “ways of reading, thinking, and writing embedded in the process of social studies inquiry” (p. 194). Our role as teachers in the humanities classroom goes far beyond simply teaching students the information, dates, battles, and people that impacted our collective past. We must also work with students to develop the critical thinking and analysis skills they will need to effectively examine historical sources. Like the authors of this article, I also believe that history is an investigative discipline that requires research be done beyond the four walls of a classroom. We are the expedition guides preparing our explorers for the world they have inherited; or as Mante-Sano et al. put it, preparing students to be “historical detectives.”

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Monte-Sano, C. and De La Paz, S. (2012). Using writing tasks to elicit adolescents’ historical reasoning. Journal of Literacy Research, 273-299.

This article comes from a collaborating teacher’s own deep dive into research surrounding our theme, and comes from the same authors as a source provided by our instructors to inform our examination of our research theme. It influenced our thinking in approaching our final research implementation lesson; both in our approach to the content and the strategies we utilized. Our lesson would task students with writing three Claim-Evidence-Reasoning paragraphs demonstrating their understanding of the bias present in propaganda, the accurate historical narrative and their own beliefs. Monte-Sano and De La Paz point out, “in history, this written work requires disciplinary thinking such as a taking an investigative stance toward the past and an understanding of the norms of knowledge construction and communication in the discipline (p. 274).” We have to find ways to guide students through the transition from basic to academic literacy, and this was the goal of the lesson study. This article also introduced us to another evidence based writing strategy; the M.E.A.L. paragraph. “M.E.A.L. stands for main idea, evidence, analysis, and link to thesis (p. 280).” This allowed our team to critically examine the strategy we implemented, and see if we faced similar challenges and successes. Monte-Sano and De La Paz also introduced our team to the document analysis approach SOAPSTone, which influenced the questions asked and the design of the graphic organizer used in our research implementation lesson (p. 295).”

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Behizadeh, N. (2019). Realizing Powerful Writing Pedagogy in U.S. Public Schools. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 14(4), 261–279.

While exploring our team’s “research theme,” I came across Nadia Behizadeh’s “Realizing Powerful Writing Pedagogy in U.S. Public Schools,” in which they were critical of the writing instruction “techniques” often utilized in U.S. public schools. According to the research compiled in Behizadeh’s article, “Writing instruction in the United States tends to focus on short, formulaic assignments that do not require thinking criticality or connect to real-world events (p. 261).” Upon reading this, I immediately wondered if our own attempts at developing students’ evidence based writing abilities could be considered “short, formulaic assignments?”

The article goes on to identify a powerful writing pedagogy (PWP) as a way to remedy the shortcomings of common writing instruction practices. The author defines PWP as a set of practices that center three essential elements: evidence based practices, methods for increased authenticity, and critical composition pedagogy. Another thing Behizadeh’s research highlights is the failure of writing instruction in preparing students to navigate sociopolitical issues in their writing. While this is not a focus of our group’s research, the application of evidence based writing techniques to politically charged argumentative writing and other genres is essential for students to grasp. Behizadeh argues that “students deserve access to writing instruction that helps them write to pass tests, meet standards, and write for the world and themselves (p. 265).”

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Sperry, C. (2014). Looking at World War I Propaganda. Social Education, 78(5), 235–240.

During the research lesson students examined propaganda from World War II. While preparing for the lesson, I wondered how we could ensure that we create opportunities for students to engage with the content in an authentic way. That also gives them a chance to practice application of the evidence based writing skills we have been working on thus far. In their article, “Looking at World War I Propaganda,” Chris Sperry provides guidance on ensuring authentic interactions between students and source through the use of a constructivist media decoding approach. According to Sperry, “[students] growing cognitive abilities enable them to separate their perspectives from the views of their parents, school, peers, and society— to challenge themselves to figure out ‘What do I believe?’” (p. 235). They go on to propose that media decoding helps to drive this truth-seeking behavior. The use of familiar strategies and practices in the classroom to facilitate media decoding sessions will make it that much more effective. In my own classroom we have gotten into the practice of doing weekly inference training using the the New York Times’ weekly “What’s Going On?” photo. This has gotten students familiar looking at media and making inferences by examining the evidence present in the image and by sharing thoughts and questions with peers.