Cycle 2: Reflection

Over the course of this year, my second year in graduate school, I was a part of three lesson study groups. Whenever undertaking a large endeavor, it is worthwhile to take time to reflect on how things have gone to better prepare for the next task.  This is a reflection on the second cycle.

This second foray in the lesson study process has offered me the opportunity to improve on the execution of the process, but offered a host of new challenges as well.  Coming into this process along with two other teachers who had just completed a lesson study (and one of them was in my Cycle 1 group), we had a good idea of how to manage the tasks that needed to be completed and keep ourselves organized.  We each had improvements we wanted to see in the process from Cycle 1 and were able to name those and make commitments to improving them.  The biggest challenge, however, was that our topic was very challenging to approach in the lesson study model done in my class.  The lesson study model focuses on gathering data (typically broadly) and then using that data to drive decisions.  However, because we focused intensely on relationship building and the internal motivators for students leaving, the type of data we wanted was either sparse or non-existent.  Even when we met with the veteran teacher trainers, they struggled alongside us to fit the problem of practice into this lesson study structure.  There was never a doubt that our problem of practice was worthy of attention, but it was not terribly conducive to this type of approach that leaned heavily on the data collected in the process.  Despite that, we were able to gather specific data for each of our focus students and my research team and I saw improvements in all of our students during this time.  To me it is unclear if this was simply a natural course of our relationships improving over time and thus our students being less likely to leave, or if the interventions in our PDSA, empathy interviews, or lesson study actually had an impact. In retrospect, our research focus is a worthy topic but is incredibly difficult to measure through data, making it a less than ideal problem of practice.

Despite not feeling like our problem of practice was appropriate for this lesson study structure, I feel like I gained a great deal from this experience.  As I prepare for the third and final cycle, I have a strong understanding of what makes a good research question, I have the experience of executing multiple lesson studies, and I know how to work with ideas that do not directly pertain to my taught subject matter.  Even beyond this process as a student, I feel that I gained a great deal professionally in my ability to connect to students and foster relationships.  The 2x10 structure from my group's PDSA showed clear benefit and helped strengthen my relationship with my two focal students, so much so that I regularly see them wandering the halls from other classes but they rarely do so from mine now.  The biggest question for me as I reflect back on this cycle - how could we have done it differently to make this fit within the lesson study structure prescribed?  Was there a better way that we could have approached the amorphous problem of practice that we had where we could have gotten a lot more data?  So much of our problem of practice is clearly so personal - a students' thoughts, comfort, and feelings of belongingness - that I'm not sure we could have done in it in a way that collected the type of data that would have been revelatory for us.