Cycle 2: Research

In the second year of my coursework with the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, I am continuing my research on 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 educators. Below are the collected research works I have created for the second cycle of this work, completed in the winter of 2023.

HTH Graduate School Year 2, Cycle 2:
Written Research Course Work

RRR - NC - Winter 23

Read 1 / Read 2 / Reflect

What changes can be made to a classroom to keep kids from leaving so frequently? Are there choices an educator can make to decrease the amount of student absence?

For the second cycle, my research team and I focused on a trend that we were noticing across all grades levels and in all subjects: students who struggled with staying in class. We looked to works that focused on combating truancy and attendance issues, as well as texts that focused on the idea of "academic safety." From my research, it is clear that an educator must make choices to ensure that their classroom is an environment in which students feel it is safe to explore and grow. I can also foster this environment by building strong relationships with students to help convey that the classroom is a safe space for them. Beyond these choices, it is also clear that institutional choices and structures impact students remaining in class. Those are tougher to counter, so I must focus on the things within my control.

Read / Ask / Reflect

What unconscious, internal drivers in students' brains lead them to leave class frequently?

While it was clear to us that their are a myriad of possible external reasons that students wish to leave, we felt it was more important to focus on the internal drivers of frequent exits. After researching the idea of creating an environment that felt safe for students, it made sense to shift the focus to the brain itself and how this impacts student behavior. Our brains are hard wired to look for social connections, and my research suggested that it is possible that some students are leaving class often because it does not feel like a "safe" environment for them to learn. It is also possible that by not spending enough time connecting to students' identities the work we are doing in my classroom may feel inaccessible to them.

RAR - NC - Winter 23

Annotated Bibiliography - NC - Winter 23

Annotated Bibliography

What are the deeper reasons that students leave class frequently?

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.

Literature Synthesis

Starting with this research cycle, I also created a Literature Synthesis where I collected the ideas from all of the materials I read over the course of this trimester and connected them to each other and to my research theme. This process took the Annotated Bibliography and expanded on the clearly defined connections I found in that work, creating a summative text that integrated all of the material for the course. Through my research, it became clear that to help minimize students leaving class frequently I needed to create an academically safe environment, deliver lessons that felt engaging and relevant, and that I needed to foster strong relationships with students.

Literature Synthesis - NC - Winter 23

Impact on Lesson Study

For this cycle, the lesson study groups were created by students indicating their curiosity about a particular challenge they were seeing in their classroom. As a 12th grade math teacher, I see kids consistently leaving class and my thoughts about the driving forces usually revolve around things being perceived as too difficult, uninteresting, or a student's lack of engagement for math. I was surprised that this problem of practice was proposed by a performing arts teacher at the elementary level - she was seeing this challenge with kids kindergarten and up (and she taught a class that had kids dancing and singing for their time together!). The nature of our classrooms could not be more different, so it was clear that as a research team we needed to focus on internal and systemic factors affecting this problem. We focused more on systemic and classroom challenges in our group's selection of texts for my Read 1 / Read 2 / Reflect.

As we researched the possible driving factors that lead to students leaving, it became clear that it was possible that many students have unconscious motivators for leaving. These could vary from lack of feeling safe, not feeling connected to their teacher, or not feeling their identity is seen, recognized, and considered as part of instruction. The second work, the Read / Ask / Reflect focused heavily on the internal, often unconscious reasons for student actions. This seemed a far more likely driver because felt far less grade and subject specific than prior motivators that I considered. During this cycle, my team and I conferred with two other veteran teacher instructors and they both pushed us to focus our thoughts on internal drivers and relationships with students.

When it came time to use this research to create our research lesson, my team initially struggled. It was very challenging to design a lesson that was meant to decrease students' classroom exits (a difficult feat where so many other lessons have failed!). In the end, my team and I decided to build a lesson that offered a number of different practices to try so that we could find methods that worked for specific focal students. It is clear to me through the work we have done and the research on this that while there are many broad choices we can make to fix this problem, it will need to be accompanied by strong relationships with kids and individualized approaches for students that struggle most with leaving frequently.

NEXT: Cycle 2 Lesson Study Process

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