Lesson Study:
Cycle One
During this lesson study cycle my team and I ventured to answer the question of how we can build confidence in our students in mathematics thinking, or more formally as our Equity Based Research Question asks, "How do we create meaningful math lessons that are relevant to students' lives and invoke confidence?"
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Research Base
Description of Inquiry Cycle
In the slideshow below you will find artifacts from this lesson study such as my teams memorialization document, lesson plan, student work and so much more. Click on the buttons on the slides to go to the full documents.
Reflection
​This entire process of lesson study has been so amazing and I just wanted to start by saying how absolutely lucky I am to have had such a great lesson study team and that I get to spend time each week with such brilliant educators. I really feel that the impact and meaningfulness of this lesson study came to light while compiling and putting it onto this digital portfolio. Working on this portfolio has made me realize how much I miss doing research and how interested I'm in in analyzing the data that I collected during this lesson study cycle but have not yet had time to process. I think that the process of lesson study can be very stressful and that a lot of times I felt as if I was missing something, but I kept the words of Carol in my mind of "If you have to do it, we'll get you through it". Those words ended up getting me through a lot. I'm sure that in the end I did too much work to document all of the things that were done/collected throughout this lesson study but I think that have some type of data analysis or concrete examples of how to document student work or data could be very helpful for people during this cycle.
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What I learned about teaching from this lesson study cycle is that I need to do more, which is hard to say because I feel like I already do so much. To expand on that first thought I believe that I need to do more because I think that being able to differentiate my instruction more and allow time for students to independently work ahead, work one on one with me, and all types of combinations in between, is what my students need. I've found that my students do really well when they are challenged, and that I generally see more behavioral issues when their tasks are too easy. I believe that by being able to challenge students, with their work and by challenging them to help each other, I will be able to work more with the students that need more explanation. I know that this will create more work for me but I have been doing something like this recently and have been enjoying it a lot. I'm very excited to see what I will learn from a lesson study cycle when I am not the host teacher and how my role changes in the group.