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In the second year of my coursework with the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, I am researching the process of lesson study and how I can use that tool to enact change in my own classroom. Through this process, I have engaged in scholarly research around a variety of topics that relate to research objectives I have created with a small team of other STEM educators. Below are the collected research works I have created for the first cycle of this work, completed in the fall of 2023.
HTH Graduate School Year 2, Cycle 1:
Written Research Course Work
Read - Ask - Reflect
Read - Ask - Reflect
Are communal notes an effective strategy for uplifting all types of learners and helping them engage with mathematical tasks?
My lesson study group and I began researching strategies for increasing collaboration in our math classrooms. Each of us recognized the benefits for math learners to engage in discussion of new ideas and to collaborate to solve problems. Through researching a process for taking communal notes and through discussions with a veteran teacher in my field, I came to the conclusion that this strategy did not appear to be one that would lead us to the collaborative goals that we sought.
Read 1 - Read 2 - Reflect
Read 1 - Read 2 - Reflect
How are early childhood math education strategies applicable in a high school classroom? How can technology be appropriately implemented to further those strategies?
My research team and I agreed that we needed to find an approach that helped increase curiosity by better offering open-ended questions and tasks that encouraged students to dig deeper into our rich mathematical ideas. We read a case study of an early childhood math classroom's approach to this and looked for ways to connect this to our own practice. I researched several articles that focused on using technology to help foster student curiosity, and I believe that effectively using specific technological tools can increase student's engagement by removing barriers to learning and helping them improve their perception of their own mathematical abilities.
Annotated Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography
In addition to the texts read for the prior two works, I have read a number of other resources to increase my understanding of lesson study and to guide my practice this year in graduate school. I have created this annotated bibliography where I summarize the key points for each of these texts and, where appropriate, relate them to my lesson study group's research goal.
Impact on Lesson Study
When my lesson study group was first formed, we were quickly able to pinpoint that the area all of us wanted to impact was student engagement. But what does that really look like, and how does it differ in each of our classrooms? Researching this has allowed us to pursue different ideas and see what that impact could be. We began by thinking about note-taking strategies, because as a group we mostly teach upper-level high school students at college preparatory schools. Being able to effectively take and utilize notes is a vital strategy for success in rigorous college environments. This idea drove both our text selection and our writing for the first research assignment, the Read - Ask - Reflect.
However, we found that this approach felt too narrow for our classrooms and after consulting with an industry veteran (Teacher on Special Assignment at the SD Department of Education), we were able to adjust our research goal from being specific to something a bit broader that allowed us more ways to measure any changes we might implement. We shifted the focus of our research to a more broad them, how do we foster a community that is curious about topics and collaborative with one another?
As we adjusted our research goal, this impacted what we researched as useful ideas for the second writing assignment, the Read 1- Read 2 - Reflect. As high school educators, we lamented that often it seems that the curiosity that drives so many young learners is lessened by the time they reach high school. We turned to early education strategies to look for ideas that could help us drive curiosity in our own upper level classrooms. Focusing on curiosity pushed our research team to think differently about how we would implement a lesson that addressed this. I also researched an article on appropriately using technology to increase student motivation, and ultimately we decided on a technological approach to address our research theme.
The research work that my lesson team did directly impacted our theme (which changed along the way), our idea testing (detailed in depth in Cycle 1: Lesson Study), and ultimately the impact we were able to make on student outcomes and thinking. Our focus on curiosity, collaboration, and technology ultimately led us to execute a lesson for our lesson study that had students using a tailored Desmos activity to learn about higher order polynomials and work together with a partner to explore new ideas and ask questions to each other.
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