In the first lesson study, I was assigned a group of similar subject matter teachers and our process began by searching for a problem of practice.  For this cycle, teachers offered problems of practice and others joined them by saying that they, too, would like to address a particular concern.  I joined a research group that was focusing on the problem of students leaving class frequently.  In my short time in education, I have noticed students in all high school grades and in all subject areas find themselves wandering the halls and not being where the lessons are being taught.  I had thought this was primarily a high school concern, and perhaps even mostly a math concern, but to my surprise my group was initiated by a performing arts teacher who instructs kindergarten through fifth graders!  The other teacher who joined our cadre was a multi-grade math teacher who was also in my first lesson study group.  For this cycle, we were able to skip the part where we needed to find a challenge we all faced - we knew it coming into this.

From the beginning, our problem of practice proved to be challenging to navigate because it was difficult to accurately measure and was difficult to identify the root causes.  Each of us in the team identified two students that we wished to focus on and had empathy interviews which did not offer any insight into why these students were frequently leaving.  We decided to collect our first set of data by observing which students left and when and then categorizing them by demographics, time they left, and other relevant details.  Despite asking students to mark their times on my out list, my data was very unreliable for this part because many of my students who are frequent leavers did not sign the out list at all.  This meant that for much of this data collection, I had to rely on my own observation which was very difficult while also running a class.  The rest of my team also struggled with gaining meaningful data at this stage, for reasons similar to mine.  Later, during the Lesson Study portion in the performing arts teacher's classroom, I would see first hand how challenging it is to track little ones in this way!

As we researched, it became clear that internal motivators and relationships should be our focus for implementing new ideas to address student absence.  My research team and I relied on the input of two veteran teacher trainers who offered us perspective on building relationships and created a classroom environment that feels safe for kids.  They suggested the practice that became the task for our Plan - Do - Study - Act cycle: 2x10 relationship building. The practice would involve us having a 2 minute conversation with students 10 days in a row that was non-academically related and instead focused on something the student is interested in.  We tracked the conversations had with each student and any noticeable effects.  By the last 3 days of the 2x10, all three members of my team saw improvements in behavior from the focal students (less frequently leaving class).

While this practice clearly impacted these two students and improved behavior, how can this process by scaled?  How do I effectively implement such a strategy if I have many students exhibiting challenging behaviors?   The 2x10 proved very beneficial but it is unclear how I would use this more broadly and instead I think it should be used to target specific students to build relationships.  

Unlike my first lesson study cycle, the problem of practice facing my research group did not lend itself to an easy way to impact it and observe student thinking.  While it was clear that we could make choices and impact student behavior, it was unclear how we could tie this to a lesson and reveal student thinking.  The point of the lesson study was to have problems of practice addressed by choices made within a lesson.  After all, school is about learning!  We had to ask ourselves: How can we use our understanding of the the internal motivators for students leaving to craft a lesson that encourages them to stay?

The lesson study for this cycle was held in the performing arts teacher's classroom with a group of 1st graders.  Initially, the thought of designing a lesson for this age group seemed daunting because I have no real familiarity with what can reasonably be expected from a 1st grader.  My research team and I spent time going through 1st grade performing arts standards (which I'll admit, I was surprised at the specificity in these!) and found in the PA teacher's curriculum that it made sense for us to study.  Her students were preparing for an exhibition and were showcasing their understanding of how to use their bodies to express themselves and designing a dance to go along with it.

Through discussions with my research team, we decided that the best way to try a strategy related to our research was to lean on the ideas of students feeling safe and connected in their classroom to keep them from leaving.  We knew that student relationships would be key, so our host teacher continued her work on relationship building with some of her students that were leaving frequently.  The lesson was set up to have "leaders" that had more responsibility and also more input into the way the class would go.  For the research lesson, these leaders were 4 students who were exhibiting problematic behavior and 1 student who was not.  We felt this was necessary to avoid creating a perception that only a certain type of student was being asked to be a leader.  We also considered setting up students to work in tandem (accountability buddies) but determined that might not be the right strategy for this age group.  We created a log sheet to track what behaviors we were seeing from the focus students, and also prepared ourselves to follow up directly with students who left class.

During the lesson, I was tasked with observing two students who frequently struggled with being able to remain in the classroom and remain engaged in the task at hand.  From the nature of the performing arts classroom for a 1st grader, not being engaged in the group plan had the same effect as wandering the halls to a 12th grader in my math class.  If they're not present, either physically or mentally, they're not there to be a part of the lesson.  Of my two focal students, one responded well the leadership position though he struggled to be on task and engaged with the lesson during the parts that did not have him leading.  My other focal student did not engage fully with the leadership task, and only seemed to engage when he was directly asked to speak (rather than lead through song or dance).  The other observed students from my research team partner performed better in regards to our research topic.

At one point, 3 of the 5 focus students all left at once, and my research team partner followed them to observe their behavior and ask them where they were headed.  On this particular occasion, they were only gone for 4 minutes to the bathroom before returning and while they did not immediately return to the group task, they were present in the room.