Cycle 3: 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 third cycle.

The third and final lesson study went far more smoothly than the previous cycles.  Some of this, of course, can be attributed to a familiarity with the process as a teacher researcher, and some of it was due to the fortuitous combination of team members, topic, and tenacity.  When this cycle began, I specifically reached out to other teachers that I wanted to work with for this final cycle because I knew of their dedication and the quality of their work.  All of the members of the team brought insightful understanding to our problem of practice, our change ideas, and the research throughout.  Armed with experience in the process and connected with a team almost entirely of math teachers, we were able to chose a problem of practice that not only felt very personal but also felt very approachable.  We had something that we could address very specifically, but still have the flexibility for lots of different change ideas and lesson possibilities.

Despite having a great setup with a great team, there were some challenges through this process.  The biggest one was simply time, in various forms.  As second semester in our classrooms moved along, there were times where work needed to be done on our lesson study outside of the normal graduate school class time and it was extremely difficult to get other people on board to work on things outside of class.  Part of that could be attributed to the culture of the classroom environment that was not always pushing the idea that stuff "needed to get done", and part of it was competing with the already busy teacher schedules of my peers.  This led to some of our work feeling fine for what it was, but could have benefited from more depth.  The most notable example of this was the ending of our lesson - we simply did not stick the landing.  While we set up the lesson beautifully, our host teacher executed it excellently, we did not allocate enough time to really connecting the social justice idea of climate injustice with the lesson in a way that made the final "a-ha" moment actually stick for kids.  It felt like it ended with a whimper.  In conversations with my lesson study team, we all agreed that we needed to spend more time with that part.  Part of the challenge of the lesson study process at this level is that we are on a strict timeline - after all, we are in school.  To perform this process away from school, as a teacher researcher in my own school, I would want to take into account having plenty of cushion time to allow for things to possibly go slower than they ought to.

The biggest success on this third and final lesson study process was the clarity of focus my team showed and the way we did our data collection during our PDSAs.  I came into this cycle knowing that I wanted this one to be the most complete and successful, and I think that happened with my team.  We were very effective at collecting compelling, useful data and then made great choices when we acted on it.  The process that led us from Graph Talk to annotation to Pala Indian Climate Change Lesson felt measured, precise, and well done.  We also had a huge windfall in finding the climate data for the Pala Indians, which just so happened to be the local Native American tribe near our host teacher's school.  We had a lot of great serendipity when we reached the group lesson portion that can't be overstated.  We were able to find the right numbers we needed, the right visuals to connect them, and the right kids to receive the lesson.  I did not see this kind of luck in prior lessons - it was fantastic.  We had a boon, and we capitalized on it.