Hello everyone and a happy Sunday to you! I had posted already this year about my work with two primary colleagues as we go through the lesson study process in planning lessons for comprehension strategies. As a reminder, lesson study begins with an 'expert lesson'--and a joint planning session with the teachers going through the lesson study process taking that expert lesson and planning together to make the lesson meet their student's needs. Then the jointly planned lesson is taught by one of the planning teachers and the others watch the lesson and take special care to collect data as to how the lesson is working. (The observers watch how the students respond and how well lesson objectives are achieved.) The team meets to debrief after the lesson and then the lesson is tweaked based on what was learned and is retaught by a second team member. And the process repeats itself...for my team...one more time. We started a lesson study cycle on visualizing. We began with the introductory lesson using the Carl books that comes from Strategies That Work. (The Carl books are mostly wordless picture books that has a dog taking care of a baby as they have all kinds of adventures.) I taught the first lesson last Wednesday. Part of the planning protocol asks the teacher who will be teaching the study lesson to consider where their students might have difficulty. Having taught this lesson before with struggling learners, I had realized that many kids have trouble 'seeing' what happens in between each of the pictures. They simply re-draw the images in the second picture. I had two wonderful posts here on this list that suggested I have the kids turn their backs and then add a hat and funny glasses to a student and ask the kids to imagine what happened while they turned their backs. I need to tell you all that this demonstration before reading helped a LOT but I still had a few kids that were having trouble with this idea once we went to the picture book. In our post-lesson discussion, my colleagues and I realized that sometimes the 'time' was too short between the two pictures... the baby got on the dog's back for example... and the kids missed these small moments. Tomorrow my colleague will reteach the lesson but we are going to SKIP a couple pages and ask the kids to visualize what happened in a "larger moment of time." We will see if this works better for kids. We also added a visual diagram where we had the words Schema and Text clues funneling into a person's head which has a video camera in it. The idea being that kids see a visual of the idea that visualizing comes from background knowledge and the text. We will see what happens next as we reteach the lesson with the improvements we made. I have to tell you all, if you ever get the chance to engage in the lesson study process, DO IT! It is a powerful way to collaborate with colleagues and I learn something important each time! Jennifer List moderator
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