I would like to see my school utilize lesson study in a
genuine way. We did this a little bit with an earlier administrator and the
results were okay. Back then, our focus was related more to just general teaching
strategies, not something explicitly related to the goals of our school. I
would like the opportunity to pursue this practice with my current peers and with
the goal of finding research based practices that are highly effective in
increasing academic vocabulary and literacy. As a Math teacher, choosing a topic
so Humanities-based may be surprising, but there is a great deal of emphasis on
modeling and utilizing language and literacy skills in Math and Science (the
state assessments in particular) that this is the type of work that would be
very useful for all. We could start by looking through our individual
curriculum to determine a specific topic related to language/literacy acquisition.
In Math, this may be something related to being able to identify the
mathematical action words in a story problem that indicate what steps or
process would be best. We would move on to creating a plan and developing a question
or two we would want answered through our research. Again, in Math this could
be related to the depth of understanding in Math-specific vocabulary, how this
will be assessed, and what types of learning opportunities will be available to
aid in this acquisition. We would then move to researching the areas hopefully
being able to identify practices or strategies that will help in general and in
our specific classes. By finding and utilizing these strategies, we are working
on developing a common set of practices, or a set of practices that aim at the
same result. Moving forward, we will reflect on the practices that worked well
and not so well to determine what is going to work best. Then, we will start
the cycle once again, looking for something that will help further lead our
students to even more success.
Overall, this process will be hindered by a few things. First, time is always a factor. With all of the initiatives we must work on for the state or district, time is at a premium. Another thing that is going to be difficult is the research aspect. Teachers may be hesitant to take on something like researching strategies that could, potentially, take a great deal of time and may be difficult to find. Another issue that may arise is that some teachers may not feel comfortable working together to share their practice in ways that this process would require. This is the most difficult thing to overcome in my opinion. Teachers, young and old, have varying levels of comfort in people accessing their classroom or their teaching practices and this can too much to ask a person until they trust those with which they work. Developing a camaraderie or sense of common purpose is going to be vital to being able to do this work with success in any school situation.
The current state of collaboration at our school is not where we would all like it to be, but it is improving. There are elements of collaborative work, but there is not a great deal of structure, at least not as there is with the lesson study. Our collaboration occurs mostly as an entire staff and does not always allow the deeper work that could happen when working with a smaller group of 6-10 people. A next step we could take would be to split up our staff into similar areas of interest and then begin forming relationships that will allow us to dive deeper into our practice than we currently do. Overall, I think our school is doing a good job with where everyone is at in their practice. We have a great deal of early career or first year teachers who are figuring things out and much of our learning is directed toward them. As we progress through the year, I am certain that we will be able to work on a deeper level and begin collaborating with one of the models we have studied.
