I wouldn’t say I felt confident in my writing abilities until I practiced them in college. Because a degree in history centers on writing and research, it took me a while to think about what I was doing well and what skills I could have developed further as a writer. Something can be said about the preparation I had in high school for this, but to place all of the responsibility on my teachers then seems unfair. I especially realize that now as a novice educator myself. As I navigate my first formal year of teaching high school, I recognize the importance of developing historical thinking skills and understanding the application of these in writing.

Here's a link to the memorialization document we worked in throughout our study cycle. 

My lesson study team chose to focus on the development of student writing in high school classrooms for our first cycle. We noticed that in our individual classrooms, challenging topics for students to learn included an evidence-to-argument connection in their writing, students having structured writing tools that set them up for success, and perspective and empathy building between themselves and the world around them.  To guide our lesson study, my team centered on the following questions:

• Which historical thinking skills are we having students focus on and how do we measure them?

• How can students connect to the sources they analyze to help support their ideas in informal writing?

• How do these skills practiced through informal writing transfer into a formal writing piece and the remainder of their educational journeys?

Through considering these questions and doing some research, I found three themes:

1. Using historical thinking skills for a deeper understanding of content

2. Scaffolding for structured writing and sourcing

3. Designing lessons with the intention of encouraging connections between content and self

Annotated Bibliography

Literature Synthesis

Lesson Study Research Theme

We will create opportunities for students to develop their close reading ability in order to interpret sources for use in evidence-based writing.

Content Goal

Students will understand the stance that countries took and/or a country’s National Values by examining WW2 propaganda. Furthermore, they will utilize their claim/evidence/reasoning and inferences skills to take a stance and answer “What do I believe?”

Grounding in Research

1. Making effective inferences correlates to reading comprehension and annotation is a useful tool to help ensure students are making meaning of what they are reading.  

2. Teaching history needs to include a process of examining original sources so that students can make their own meaning out of it.

3. Students should utilize evidence from these sources to support a claim.  

The Lesson Plan:

Launch: 

We will begin with a warm-up activity that uses an image from World War I. Students will be given time to closely examine the image and make inferences based on the evidence in the photo. 

They will then write a Claim/Evidence/Reasoning paragraph about what they think is happening in the photo. Students will share their thinking with a peer, and see if their interpretations were the same. This activity will conclude with an opportunity to share their thoughts with the class.

Explore:

For this portion of the lesson, we will review the CER structure the students will use two write their “What do I believe?” paragraphs.  We will review what a claim is, what evidence is, and how to reason (connect the claim to the evidence that supports it). This will be done by sourcing responses from the class to build our definitions for each of these. 

Prior to this lesson, students will have explored the propaganda as well as primary and secondary sources about the historical narrative associated with the propaganda. Using their research, synthesis, and inferences from the previous lessons this week, students will work to write an “Explodation” (exploded explanation) using the CER paragraph.

Drop your anchor:

The final portion of this lesson will task students with synthesizing the information they have accumulated in their graphic organizers over the week into an evidence-based paper that answers the question, “What do I believe?” 

In this final portion of the lesson, students will work on the first draft of their Explodation Papers. These papers will combine their written words with visuals that add to the points they are making, or serve to further define key terms they identify.

Focal Student Assets and Needs:

Assets:

• Independent worker, self-motivated but not a leader.

• Academically motivated, always paying attention to the teacher.

• Inquisitive, does independent research if clarification is needed.

Needs:

• Developing a relationship with the teacher

• Vocabulary/sentence scaffolds

• Collaboration for interpersonal skills

General Observations of Lesson:

Students enjoyed the warm-up activity. My focal student was engaged with the picture, zooming in to examine the fine details of the parade, people, buildings, etc. A number of students connected to their prior knowledge during this activity.

Students then revisited their definitions of the words propaganda and bias. Not much collaboration happened during this time, which could have been beneficial. 

The lesson then moved into independent work time for students to construct their argumentative paragraphs. 

Observation of Focal Student:

My focal student has not changed much academically from when I had him last year. He didn't participate in conversations or discussions at all during the lesson. Instead, he took his typical role as an active listener with his computer closed to give his classmates and teacher his full attention. 

At the start, he made some basic inferences on his google doc, without providing context about what made him draw those conclusions.

For the bias and propaganda definitions, he went to his graphic organizer and pulled some ideas from there to write down.

For the final activity, he worked quietly and did a bit more research. He didn't collaborate with his classmates or ask for help from the teacher. 

The writing piece is generally informal. It focuses on what propaganda is in a general sense, but doesn't compare and contrast propaganda narratives that should have been explored days prior. There is a claim, but no evidence from a specific piece of propaganda or other primary/secondary sources.

I think the overall goal of our lesson was not met. Students weren't able to finish the task that we had planned because the set up we had planned for days before this lesson didn't happen. If this work had been done, students might have been able to complete better analytical paragraphs. However, students were able to demonstrate their abilities regarding connections to outside learning, where they were able to make inferences about what the picture was showing for the warm-up activity. 

Some of the biggest missed opportunities for this lesson was creating instances of collaboration, where students were able to share their thinking. One of the biggest things I remember from last year was the idea that "whoever is doing the talking is doing the thinking." Unfortunately, students were mostly silent for this lesson. If I were to plan this for my own context, I would design moments in the lesson so that students are constantly sharing ideas and making meaning of writing structures together.

I also realize the importance of scaffolding and designing lessons with intention. Without proper guidance from the teacher, students are not always set up for success. Enabling students to write analytically successful writing is a process that is built of many components: translating inferences, knowing sentence structures, and practicing the writing structure. When teaching argument writing and inferencing in the future, I inted to allow for spaciousness and openness to try things out and refine them.

I appreciated the opportunity to try lesson study cycles. I know in what ways I can push myself and my practice through intentional design, scaffolding, and thinking about what specific skills and tasks I'm asking my students to practice. Now that I have experienced the whole process of it, I'm excited to refine my practice to be successful in the future.