Reflections

Lesson study:

This lesson study cycle was an interesting one for me personally. At the beginning of this particular cycle, I was not a fan of what my team wanted to take on, which was agency. I personally felt that this was a High Tech High buzz word that was often thrown around the organization, but did not have a firm meaning. After expressing this concern with my lesson study team, we were able to create our own meaning for agency, which was focused on student pride, dignity and responsibility in their work. This was a better definition as it made the word and idea of "agency" more concrete for me. As a team, we decided to tackle our definition of agency through the use of peer feedback. We also came up with a strong lesson sequence that would help lead students into using claim evidence and reasoning in the feedback they provided to their peers.

Takeaways:

One of the biggest takeaways for me in this cycle was how impactful showcasing student work and allowing peer feedback helped students. In my own class I was able to have a couple of rounds of peer to peer feedback, which I believe helped students feel more dignified. In the instances where I required peer feedback I believe my focal students took some more pride in their work as they were aware that other classmates were going to read their work, encouraging them to try their best. One thing I would have liked to try more of was spotlighting student work. My hesitation with student spotlights, more specifically one student's work being spotlighted to the whole class, was that many middle schoolers seem to have this fear of the spotlight and have not yet built up the confidence to have their work showcased. Moving forward, I would like to make this a bigger part of my future classes to allow students to be celebrated and receive more feedback from their peers.