Lesson Study Cycle 1
Research Theme: Find ways to empower students to analyze their reactions and experiences with texts through extracting meaningful evidence to communicate their understanding and opinions.
Content Understanding Goal: Students will understand the content of one of the major founding documents, the Bill of Rights, of American civilization. They will be able to recognize the importance of annotating in the margins of a text to deeper understand the content, which will be demonstrated through a formal assessment of a completed Tweet.
Lesson Study Memorialization Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qsURINz1h1CWBMXO7OEjABEHg837so0bcgfGZ4wi0dE/edit?usp=sharing
Lesson Plan
1
Getting them Ready
1) Give instruction/presentation on annotation, marginalia, and primary vs. secondary sources
2) Provide either primary or secondary reading for students to write in the margins ON THE SAME TOPIC (MLK I have a Dream Speech)
​​3) Freddie’s students’ warm-up with writing a bill of a personal issue you have – who would sign it, why it is important, etc.
2
Lesson Day
1) Individual think and annotation time on the original Bill of Rights document.
2) Come together in table groups to decode using a thesaurus and put all 10 amendments in their own words on a poster.
3) Come back together to share their noticing and wonderings. Watch video to see if their decoding was successful.
3
Final Product
1) Explain to students the rubric of their Tweet and give an example of strong-opinion Tweets.
2) Students will synthesize their biggest takeaway and understanding from the Bill of Rights based on their marginalia in a 120 character Tweet
Focal Students
A bit more Emphasis on student thinking
Before the lesson I believed that I may have picked the wrong focal students for this case study. After looking at my peers notes about the day and analyzing my students' work I comprehend that I made the right choice. All three focal students did a great job in completing the assignments we prepared for them. Nevertheless, each student needs to improve on some skills. Focus student #1 does well in getting his work done quickly but needs more help in revising his work to make his writing and analysis stronger. Focus student #2 needs to be able to do his work and then use his phone once he has completely finished, because it is impossible to multitask and produce amazing work. Focus student #3 seems to be comprehending the content and so now I am wondering how I could motivate him more to be more engaged with the work we are doing.
Reflection
Overall, I feel extremely proud of all my students and my peers. I want to start by celebrating my students because annotating the Bill of Rights was not an easy task. I felt really nervous for them and thought that maybe they would not be able to do it. It reminded me to one of the readings I did for this class and it talked about a teacher who had the same feeling as me. I am happy to report that we both underestimated the brilliance of our students. In addition, I realized that it is a great thing when students grapple on a thing because struggling is part of every success story. I do believe most of my students succeeded in analying their reactions and experiences with texts through extracting meaningful evidence to communicate their understanding and opinions.
Now, because of this study I was able to understand my focal students even more and I am extremely grateful of that. I have a better understanding now on why focus student #1 likes to get up so much during class, it is not because he is finished with his work, but because he needs help and he does not know how to ask for it. I understand that focus student #2 is having issues at home because of his parents separation and therefore he loves to joke around and get distracted with his phone. Finally, I understand that focus student number #3 is extremely smart and that I need to find better ways to get him engaged in the material.
Thank you to my group who helped me so much throughout this whole process. I love our name, "Team Working on it" because we should always be working on everything since nothing is ever really done. I want to finish by saying that I am very optimistic and even though sometimes, as teachers, we feel like we need to be perfect, truth is we should always be learning from our mistakes and getting better and better for the sake of our students.