Lesson Study Cycle 1
Equity-Based Research Theme: How do students’ sense of belonging and academic identity affect their willingness and capability to give meaningful feedback to each other, and implement the feedback they receive to create stronger writing pieces?
Artifacts
Through the PDSA cycle, we identified that students needed to be pushed to talk to peers outside of their social circle.
We chose the lesson format of socratic seminar, with the two content understanding goals of: Students will recognize the role of a hero in narrative fiction as a metaphor for human growth, struggle, achievement and learning. Students will understand the importance of using textual evidence to support their claims in a verbal exchange of ideas with their peers that builds on each other’s learning.
Student Work
FS2 was such an interesting case study. It was evident through their comments in the seminar that they were able to analyze the text at an extremely high level. Through interactions with other students and decisions made during their coaching time, it was also evident that FS1 did not do much preparation before class, which was expected.
Insights and Analysis
I am eager to continue exploring student academic identity and sense of belonging. Through this lesson cycle, I learned that student voice, choice, and agency are key elements to building confidence and investment in students, however middle school presents unique challenges to this goal. For example, teaching students that they have agency and how to make good decisions with that agency has proven to be a worthwhile, yet challenging, exercise. I am happy with our choice to conduct a Socratic Seminar, as I believe it is an incredible activity to decenter the teacher within the space and encourage a deep level of discourse among students.
Further analysis can be found in the documents below: