Lesson Study Cycle 1 - Evidence Based Writing
What strategies can we utilize to help students further develop their ability to identify and utilize evidence in supporting a claim in their writing?
How do we get students excited to explore our history, and in a way that ensures each student sees themself in the content we engage with? This is the question that guides my teaching philosophy. I am a lifelong learner always looking for new ways to ignite a sense of curiosity in the minds of my students. I believe that it is essential to spark students' curiosity to explore the world beyond the classroom and to help them hone the skills they will need in college and beyond. Our world has become smaller and more interconnected than at any point in our collective history. Students have the vast wealth of human knowledge at their disposal; literally at their fingertips. Amazing as that may sound, many students will need guidance to safely navigate the expansive sea of information that lays before them. It is also essential for them to become confident in their ability to articulate their world views, both in writing and verbally. The classroom provides us with an opportunity and space to do exactly that.
In our first lesson study cycle my team turned our attention to honing students' writing abilities; specifically their ability to write evidence-based paragraphs. We noticed that while students may be able to write and articulate their thoughts in a free flowing, or stream of consciousness, style of writing, they struggled when tasked with writing in an academic style. Our group decided to focus on assisting students in developing their academic writing ability through the introduction of a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning paragraph structure. Before we could really engage with the lesson study process and begin implementing ideas in the classroom, I needed to get a better understanding of what lesson study was.
[Understanding the Lesson Study Process]
Lewis and Hurd’s “Lesson study step by step: How teacher learning communities improve instruction” 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 write, “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).
While the lesson study process is highly collaborative it requires a lot of self reflection and close examination of your own teaching style, and for the host teacher this is paired with the increased vulnerability of having your practice observed. Lewis and Hurd also 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). 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. I am thankful for the chance to authentically examine my own teaching practices through out this lesson study cycle.
[Establishing and utilizing familiar strategies to hone essential skills]
If lesson study can be so overwhelming for teachers, than how overwhelmed do students feel when learning a new skill? How can we make it easier for students to develop their evidence based writing skills? 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” (Monte-Sano, C., De La Paz, S., & Felton, M. K. 2015, 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.” Except in my classroom students are explorers on an expedition through human history.
I further explored how best to implement strategies into the weekly routines of my own classroom. Thanks to the collaborative element of the lesson study cycle, I was provided with another article Monte-Sano, De La Paz, and Felton, which a collaborating teacher’s own deep dive into research surrounding our theme. “Using writing tasks to elicit adolescents’ historical reasoning” influenced my thinking in approaching our final research implementation lesson; both in the way I approached 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 (Monte-Sano, C. and De La Paz, S., 2012, 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 (Monte-Sano, C. and De La Paz, S., 2012, 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 (Monte-Sano, C. and De La Paz, S., 2012, p. 295).”
[Creating opportunities for students to explore history authentically and intentionally]
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 (Behizadeh, N., 2019, 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?” I worried that this may be counterproductive in creating authentic and intentional opportunities for students to engage with history. As well as to authentically express their thoughts and opinions on the history they would engage with in lesson study unit.
During the research lesson students examined propaganda from World War II. How do we give students a chance authentic and intentional opportunities for students to engage with history, and to apply 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?’” (Sperry, C., 2014, 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.
Behizadeh goes on to identify powerful writing pedagogy (PWP) as a way to remedy the shortcomings of common writing instruction practices, and provided me with insight on how best to avoid short formulaic writing 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 (Behizadeh, N., 2019, p. 265).”
I am thankful for this experience navigating a lesson study cycle. It has allowed me an opportunity to not only reflect closely on my own practices as a teacher, but to do so with peers who are also curiosity driven educators hoping to better understand their own practices. Like the strategies implemented in my classroom helped assisted students in developing their evidence based writing, lesson study has provided me with a way to explore my teaching practice.