M.Ed Lesson Study:  Summary

For the first lesson study cycle, I was teamed with other STEM educators and we focused on the challenge of getting students to rely on each other rather than on the teacher as viable sources of knowledge.  This was my first time participating in the lesson study process, and my collaborators and I focused on note taking as how we wanted to help improve student outcomes.  Through the lesson study process, we had a guide from out side our program who offered us some directed assistance and helped us reframe our work to focus on students relying on each other, rather than just on taking notes.  This redirection led to a lesson that focused on students using collaborative technology to investigate new concepts together and discuss their findings all along the way.  The biggest lesson I took away from this was the power of an outside collaborator to help frame and focus the study process so that it as meaningful as possible.  This lesson study was completed on October 26, 2023.

For the second lesson study cycle, I worked with teachers across all grade levels to address a concern about students who find it challenging to remain in the classroom, thus missing critical parts of lessons.  Since we now had experience with the process, I felt that this one would go much smoother than the first.  However, that turned out to not be the case.  While we were able to find ample research into both absenteeism and root causes that might leave students to leave class, we struggled as a group to create tangible strategies to counter this behavior while also being able to collect data on our results.  Many of the strategies focused on relationship building and other soft skills which certainly appeared to make a difference, but we were not able to collect hard data on their actual impact.  The biggest lesson I took away from this was that some problems, though worth addressing, are not best addressed in a lesson study process that values strong data and tangible results.  This lesson study was completed on February 8, 2024.

For the third lesson study cycle, I worked with a team of primarily math educators to find better and more effective ways to get students to understand and interpret graphs.  Appropriately, this lesson study cycle felt the most successful of the three.  Having experienced two cycles (including one that did not work as well as I had hoped), I was able to work with a team to thoughtfully craft an actionable problem of practice, create change ideas that head meaningful, measurable results, and ultimately create a lesson that incorporated all the learning I had from this cycle.  The biggest lesson that I took away from this is that well-executed collaborative design offers fantastic insights and allows a broader range of options for testing ideas and implementing them in classrooms.  This lesson study was completed on May 22, 2024.