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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 third cycle of this work, completed in the spring of 2024.
HTH Graduate School Year 2, Cycle 3:
Written Research Course Work
Read / Ask / Reflect
Read / Ask / Reflect
My lesson study team knew from the beginning that we wanted to focus on visual representations of data and how kids make sense of them. We also knew that we wanted to help students connect with social justice causes through the lens of mathematics. We went looking for articles that would help us connect these two ideas, and found one that really resonated with us because it addressed the challenges of approaching social justice through mathematics. In this short essay, I focus on the benefit of using social justice ideas to strengthen students mathematical understanding of graphs. I address some of the challenges for both new and veteran teachers, and offer some strategies that help students build on prior learning as they process new ideas (or old ideas seen in a new way!).
Annotated Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography
How do we help students engage with math ideas through a focus on social justice?
In addition to the texts read for the prior work, 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. This annotated bibliography, and the ones from the previous two cycles, were immensely helpful in building the Literature Synthesis article shown below. The process of creating an annotated bibliography made it easy to look up my own prior thoughts on readings and reference them.
Literature Synthesis: Integrating Social Justice Into Math Lessons Through Data Driven Practices
Literature Synthesis: Integrating Social Justice Into Math Lessons Through Data Driven Practices
As the final task for this lesson study, we were charged with creating a synthesis of all of our research (both readings and our field work). Along with another member of my lesson study team, we chose to write an article that went through our lesson study data gathering and usage process. By following data driven practices, we were able to create a social justice oriented lesson that was meaningful for our lesson study classroom AND had a means for them to convey their mathematical and contextual understanding because of the toolkit we offered.
This article is currently a draft, and is in revision process. This article was cowritten with Ella Darvas, a middle school math teacher at King-Chavez Academy of Excellence. (Digital Portfolio)
Impact on Lesson Study
Now that this is the third time I am doing a lesson study, the importance of researching and finding literature that moves your ideas forward is clearly critical and a driving force in selecting readings. The program asked our lesson study team to choose a pedagogical design strategy to incorporate into our research theme. My team initially looked at Complex Instruction, as this has clearly evident ties to mathematical pedagogy, but shifted to focusing on lessons revolving around Social Justice because we all felt that was an area where we were less experienced and wanted to get stronger. All of our readings for this lesson study cycle focused on the challenges but importance of integrating social justice and culturally responsive lessons into the classroom, which would ultimately be enacted in our group lesson.
Many of the articles we found were pitches - meaning to convince the math educator to try integrating social justice. Only a few that we ran across gave methodology or direct examples of how these types of lessons were implemented. We relied on these few that did to help guide how we crafted our own group lesson.
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