M.Ed Coursework

Year 2 of the San Diego Teaching Residency is a year long program based on fine-tuning one's teaching practice by deeply reflecting and (re)assessing what is effective and what can be adjusted in the classroom. Over the course of the year, participants are asked to conduct lesson studies that focus on specific practices, trying them in class, collecting data, and reflecting on the effectiveness of the practice while integrating input from fellow educators. The work below showcases the process of the lesson study cycles.

Lesson Study Cycle 1

Equity-Based Research Theme: Students will begin with something they are knowledgeable about/connect with it, collaborate with each other, and share their learning with each other.
Content Understanding Goal: Students will understand that informational texts are most useful when they have identified the key points and most relevant information. They will also understand that the context informs the value of information. Students will feel confident in evaluating the reliability of the source.
Lesson Study Memorialization Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clk2vwYa3JHkoHGwuEOxJyjEbDKOFP4S75BHksr1Zf0/edit

Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA)

The PDSA Cycle is a process that helps educators pinpoint a specific activity or lesson that they think will help an area that they see is lacking in their class (i.e. engagement, collaboration, grammar skills, etc). The common issue our group had was increasing the level of engagement students showed when interacting with class content. In order to achieve a higher level of engagement, we decided to implement strategies such as Pair-Shares to give students a chance to formulate their thoughts in a low-stakes scenario before inviting students to share with the whole class. The class generally showed higher engagement after Pair-Shares and tended to be more willing to share their thinking with the class. We also noticed that this increased the amount of peer feedback while they discussed their thinking with each other and prompted many students to provide new insights that their partners may not have caught. Overall, implementing these techniques was helpful but we chose to adapt this strategy so that we incorporate Pair-Shares throughout the entirety of the lesson so that conversations can be more specific. Additionally, this PDSA cycle led us to implement reading roles for the lesson study because students would be reading an article together and the goal was to use the collective power of the whole group to keep everyone engaged while reading.

Lesson Plan

Preparation

Students were introduced to the unit by participating in an activity where they worked together to compete a Venn diagram comparing facts and opinions. Students then used this knowledge to write their own facts and opinions on a common topic. Students also began to explore what informational texts are and how they differ from fictional texts.

Lesson Day

Students briefly reviewed what the main idea of an informational text is and the purpose it serves. Then students were given an article about adaptable video game controllers and were instructed to read in a group. Students were given specific roles to ensure that everyone was participating in the group read while completing a graphic organizer to display and organize their thinking.

Final Product

After reading the article with their groups and collaboratively identifying the main idea as well as supporting details, students were instructed to create a movie poster to showcase their learning. Students had the option to create their movie posters digitally or by hand and were asked to present their posters to the class once they finalized their designs.

Lesson Debrief

After teaching and observing the lesson, there were many aspects that are offer so much insight into the learning that is going on throughout the lesson. While the lesson went well overall, there were some parts of it that felt like they could be tweaked for a richer learning experience that would foster a higher level of engagement. The main aspect of the lesson we want to tweak is the reading roles that the students chose when initiating their group read through of the article. Something we noticed during the lesson was that there seemed to be a sort of power dynamic within the different roles that were available to students. The roles consisted of to readers, a word finder, and a facilitator/time keeper. What we found was that students with self-percieved reading difficulties typically chose either the word finder or facilitator/time-keeper roles because it allowed them to not read the article as closely as their peers. On the other hand, the readers were typically the students little to no trouble reading so they were reading more closely which allowed them to identify the main idea and supporting details much easier than the other group members. In the future, we believe that it would be beneficial to strategically assign these roles to students based off of their assests and growth areas.

Research Base

RAR

RRR

Annotated Bibliography

The coursework for the first trimester requires the completion of multiple academic writing pieces. The first was a Read 1-Ask 1-Reflection (RAR) which was a writing piece synthesizing one article and an interview conducted with another educator. The other writing piece was a Read 1-Read 2-Reflection (RRR) where we researched and found two scholarly articles that were on the subject of our Equity-Based Research Theme and synthesized the main ideas that stuck with us and could push our thinking and practice. Our final writing piece was an annotated bibliography that consists of all the readings completed in trimester one. Overall, these writing pieces helped inform the entire lesson study process as we went through each stage. The RAR was helpful during the early ideation stages when our group was trying to pinpoint a specific problem in our classes which ended up being engagement. The RAR provided lots of practical strategies and concepts (i.e. historical inquiry, enduring understanding) that can be used to engage students in a more meaningful way. The RRR was helpful in a similar way but it was useful because it helped me understand that there are different levels and modalities in which students can display their engagement. This assignment pushed my thinking by challenging my preexisting notion of what student engagement looks, sounds, and feels like. The annotated bibliography helped by providing a concise but detailed overview of the content within the course readings which served as a strong scaffold for when I observed our lesson for the lesson study.

Reflection

Overall, this entire lesson study process has been extremely helpful. It was an excellent way to revisit my own practice while also working with other educators to solve a common issue. One component of the lesson study process that felt extremely helpful was the collaboration with other educators. Although we all taught different grades and had different positions, we all managed to have similar issues that we wanted to find solutions for. It also served as a reminder that we are all experiencing similar things that were not necessarily reflections of our teaching ability. Another component of the lesson study process that felt beneficial was learning how to collect data from students that could inform the changes we would make. This was something that I had not thought of before this process but now it makes so much sense that I use physical concrete data to decide what changes should be made. After completing this process, I feel confident that the adaptations that we made to what we thought needed to change will yield positive results for the entire class.