We all have moments we remember forever - where we received the news of 9/11, the last things we did before everything shut down for the Covid-19 pandemic, our response to the murder of George Floyd. These moments are public but also deeply personal, similar to the moment of finding out we missed deep learning of key skills in our education. For example, I remember the moment I learned that paragraphs should have a structure. While in university, a professor had to explain what in hindsight seemed obvious and simple to me: a paragraph should have a structure, which allows for clearer ideas to be conveyed to your reader. As a result, this structure results in the ease of building an argument. How did I miss out on such a key piece of knowledge, which had the ability to organise my thoughts and transform my writing into words and ideas that made sense? 

Now, as a teacher, I notice that students need ways of structuring their ideas. From my experience of elementary and middle school writing, much focus is on writing stamina and simple expression in writing. This is apparent as my ninth graders often submit pages of writing without paragraphs or punctuation. Their ideas are so free flowing it is often difficult to know where one idea ends and a new one begins, or how to identify which one they feel is most important. Knowing what I know about structuring and organising ideas has helped me to communicate in both academic and professional settings. However, teaching students to organise their paragraphs is a skill that if I master teaching will enable me to label my teaching practice a success. 

Based on looking at student work we noticed that students have not yet developed the skill of explaining how their evidence relates to their claim. We hypothesised that teaching them what an inference is and how to make them might help them make their reasoning more explicit.

My lesson study team and I approached this first by looking at research around how to teach the connection between the piece of evidence and its meaning. We noticed that students could often provide relevant evidence and were challenged by explaining what the evidence meant and why that evidence supported their main idea. As we dug into this problem we learned that the core of this problem was students' ability to make text to self, text to world and text to text connections that enable them to make inferences (informed guesses) about what is going on and then be able to express these ideas in writing. Our research therefore focused on teaching strategies that help students surface their connections and inferences and apply them in written form. From those readings I noticed the following themes: Teaching Metacognitive language; the importance of prior oral processing, a need to support Reading comprehension to support analytical ability, and a need to build routines around each skill. I expand on key learnings and ideas about each below. 

Further details on the research we did can be found in my annotated bibliography and literature synthesis linked below.

Annotated Bibliography

Literature Synthesis

Lesson Study Memorialisation Document

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/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. There is a link between students speaking their thinking out loud and writing their thinking down, meaning that an oral practice where students speak their conclusions from evidence and then record them in writing might work. 

2. 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.   

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

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

Lesson Flow

We began the lesson with a warm up activity that we do on a weekly basis in our classroom, What’s Going On? We used an image from World War I for this activity. Students were given time to closely examine the image and make inferences based on the evidence in the photo. They then wrote a Claim/Evidence/Reasoning paragraph about what they think is happening in the photo. Students then shared their thinking with a peer to see if their interpretations were the same. This activity will conclude with an opportunity to share their thoughts with the class. 

Next we reviewed the CER structure the students will use to 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 “Expladation” (expanded explanation) using the CER paragraph structure to answer the following questions:  What does the propaganda say? What is the accurate historical narrative?

What do I believe?

The final portion of this lesson asked students to synthesize 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?” By this point in the unit, students will have interacted with propaganda (in depth analysis of 2 pieces), and examined two sources related to the historical narrative attached to their propaganda topic (at least 2 sources). 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. 

Link to Lesson Plan

Slide Deck

Focal Student Assets and Needs:

Assets

• Enjoys discussion

• Has a powerful advocative voice when believe in what he is arguing for

• Strong interpersonal skills

• Interested in history

Needs

• Build tolerance for frustration

• Scaffolding for vocabulary

• Chunking of tasks into small pieces

• Strong relationship with teacher

Observations:

Students were generally engaged with the warm up. Many students were looking at the image displayed both on their laptops or on the projector screen. A few students (3 or 4) connected to prior knowledge they had to make inferences about the event, period and location of the picture. The lesson then moved into refreshing student thinking on bias and propaganda. From my position as an advisor it was difficult to tell whether students were engaged in this process or what they were highlighting in the graphic organiser they had pulled up on their laptops. The lesson then moved into independent writing time for students. Seventy five percent of students seemed to be engaged with the writing process. 

Observation of Focal Student:

My focal student spent short periods of time during full group instruction on-task and frequently engaged in other behaviours. Every 4-5 minutes of oral instruction he would eat a snack, check his phone, play a game or engage in some other form of distraction. To his credit he seemed to be trying to focus on what was going on really hard. The focal student participated in the whole group defining participation and bias. Interestingly he held his whiteboard at chin level rather than above his head, perhaps suggesting his level of confidence with the material. He raised his hand to ask a question and would get frustrated by the amount of time it would take to get his question answered and give up and put his hand down again. During independent work time the student was more engaged with the task at hand and wrote consistently. He produced 3 paragraphs in the 40 minutes given. 

From my perspective this lesson was not successful in producing the data we needed to decide whether teaching inferences enabled kids to write better analytical paragraphs. There were however bright spots in student thinking.  Students enjoyed and were engaged by the image in the warm up and three students made connections to prior and outside knowledge in order to come up with conclusions about what the story behind the image was. Some of those inferences  led to correct answers. 

Secondly the lesson did not give us a lot of opportunities for seeing student inferential thinking at work or opportunities for students to practice inferential thinking. Instead it was dominated by a lot of teacher talk time reminding students of concepts they had already covered but not actually asking them to apply their knowledge in any way. If I were to plan a similar lesson in the future we might build the inferences kids made in the warm up into a paragraph they could write collaboratively with a partner to have student practice putting their inferential thinking down on paper. This would do more to build on the research we did that found it was important for students to write down the steps in thinking they are able to articulate orally but are challenged with articulating in writing. It could also be built into a formal routine so that students get more and more practice with doing it. Another benefit of having students write an introductory paragraph is the opportunity to model the writing of a structured analytical paragraph. This is another strategy that the research emphasized was important and which we did not include.

Reflecting on how our lesson went I wonder whether our initial goal was too large. Enabling students to write analytically successfully is a process built of many components: translating inferences from a spoken ability to a written ability; knowing sentence structures that cue the reader to the part of analysis you are writing and having practiced writing each of these structures many times in a low stakes way. We set out to figure out what the teaching moves are that successfully teach students inferences; however, investigating teacher moves leaves too much room for teacher personality and error. We might have been more successful focusing on whether an oral routine of translating spoken argument to writing enabled students to make better connections between their evidence and their reasoning.

In summary, I appreciated the opportunity to dive into teaching routines that enable students to produce high quality analysis and feel that I now have a clearer idea of a way forward to implement in my classroom as I move through my teaching career.