Bonita I was hoping you would 'bite' and respond to this email! Thanks for your thoughtful questions. One thing I think I need to make clear about our lesson study group before I respond to your questions, we are all on different grade levels: K, 1 and below level third. This has some real advantages for lesson study...and some VERY real disadvantages too. More on that in a bit. We had planned as a group the language choices...some in our debrief/planning meeting and others via email before I taught...but we had agreed on a group on all I described in yesterday's email...all except the part where I added the part about quiet time being needed to maximize thinking. That was something that was spur of the moment. We are trying not to do too much of this spur of the moment stuff...we want to really study the effect of the changes we do make and we know if you adjust too much, it is hard to tell what causes the changes in student learning. We had already recorded lots of data before that exit slip, so we were able to control for that, I think. As for your second question, the K teacher taught the original lesson and I taught the revised one in third...so there was a big jump in developmental levels. Some of the differences in our question data between our two classes would be developmental differences...a disadvantage for lesson study. Yet I would like to share some of the great questions that my kiddos in third came up with for your consideration: First, you need to know a little about the book. In Grandfather Twilight, a grandfather figure takes a pearl off of "an endless strand of pearls", walks with it to the ocean and as he walks, the pearl gets larger, animals hush and you see the grandfather's clothes start to turn sunset colors with the sky changing to the same colors behind him. Eventually he "gives the pearl to the silence above the sea" where it becomes the moon...but the book never says outright that the pearl is the moon." My favorite question was from a special ed student reading at the end of first grade level. He said, "I wonder why he is the sky?" When I asked the child why he thought that was his best question, he said "it helped his partner notice that Grandfather Twilight was making the sunset sky as he walked." To me, that shows this child understood not only what was going on, but the power of his own question in enhancing learning. Another example was "I wonder why he was called Grandfather Twilight". This little girl said it was her best question because it made her wonder the whole book and it helped her figure out that twilight means almost night time and that grandfather twilight was "like father nature because he sets the sun and makes night." I have taught questioning with this book to many grade levels before, and while I always asked students to share questions, by asking them to share only their best questions, I feel like we took the focus from the question to what the question made them understand...a crucial point, I think and a definite improvement from other times I have taught the lesson. (Previously I would get questions like "why does he have a dog" and "why is he putting his coat on" which, while natural, don't lead to any deeper understanding of the story.) My follow up will be further modeling on questions for one group of five kids out of my 22 students. A couple (2) of these kids were still making statements...predictions, and while they showed thinking about the text, I am not sure they get the idea of what a question is. An example: "I think the guy is magical." Others had questions but struggled mightily with justifying why it was the best question or the question seemed to be focused on a small but unimportant detail "Why is the dog going home with him?" And, Bonita, the kids had never seen the book before. It was completely new to all but one student. If you look back at my original post, the predictions were way off....but once we came back to them at the end, the kids were really able to see how their thinking changed. And I totally agree with your views on the importance of conscious choices in teacher language. Peter Johnston's work (Choice Words) convinced me of that a while back. You could make yourself crazy with it though. I personally always struggled with that aspect of lesson study. What about the teachable moment???What happens when, in spite of all attempts to anticipate how students will react, you have the students do something very unexpected? And as for doing lesson study with multiple grade levels...one huge advantage: we have been able to see a continuum for each strategy we taught....how kids think in K, 1 and 3 when presented with strategy instruction. Kids still think at very high levels but how a K kid expresses it and how my third graders with learning challenges express it are very different but still powerful. Our biggest ah-has this year (along with just figuring out how to DO lesson study) were :1 the importance of choosing the right texts for a particular group of kids 2: the importance of tightening the alignment of the lesson all the way through---from motivational opening to closure and 3. The value of EPR: (Every Pupil Response) techniques to continually monitor student understanding all the way through. Thanks, again, for your thought provoking questions. You did a dissertation on this topic, right??? We ARE lesson study rookies and were still learning to improve our process on our fifth round but it has been extremely powerful learning for us nonetheless. Jennifer In a message dated 4/8/2008 2:14:53 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Jennifer, Thanks for sharing more of your lessons study with us. It sounds like a wonderful lesson, and I am left with some questions. Did your colleagues realize that you had intentionally changed the language you were using--and was this something planned? What sorts of changes in questions did you see (do you have examples from the observation notes)? What are you thinking about as a follow-up lesson for those students who did not quite get there. I assume by the student summaries in the beginning that they had heard this story before this lesson? What I take away from your notes is the reaffirmation of careful word choice. I remember this from my own lesson study experience in mathematics as well. One of the things we saw in Japanese lessons was this exacting way teachers had of wording things. We learned that much of that wording was a result of the lesson study experience, and we found the same thing happening to us when we tried our own mathematics lesson study. Many teachers I have talked with get disturbed by this exacting idea of teacher talk. I think they relate it to scripted lessons and fear a gestapo method. Yet to me the difference with lesson study is teacher consciousness and ultimate choice and that is so profoundly important. (How can a teacher not be thinking about the lesson, and yet expect and hope that students will?) Thank you for sharing your experience, Bonita **************Planning your summer road trip? Check out AOL Travel Guides. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-guide/united-states?ncid=aoltrv00030000000016) _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
