‘Lesson Study’

Between now and the end of this academic year we are planning to facilitate and engage in another round of the Lesson Study programme of action research as a way of pursuing our ‘continued professional learning’. This blog posts aims to reinforce (for those familiar with the programme) or introduce (for those that are not) the Lesson Study concept and programme and to explain how we at Newlands will be engaging with the Lesson Study concept.

What is it? Lesson Study is a ‘highly specified form of classroom action research involving groups of teachers collaboratively planning, teaching, observing and analysing learning and teaching in ‘research lessons”. Pete Dudley, the man responsible for bring Lesson Study to the United Kingdom paints a picture of the origins, rationale and impact of Lesson Study over the past decade in this excellent blog post: ‘Lesson Study: professional learning for our time’.

How does it work? The process involves the following stages:

1. Analyse your data and identify your focus Use data from day to day assessment to agree a focus for pupils’ learning and progress. The research focus will always look something like: ‘We want to learn how to improve the way we teach…..X.. to Y.’

2. Identify your lesson study group Two, three or more people with dedicated time and support. Set ground rules for assessed risk taking and joint ownership of the research lessons.

3. Connect with, and draw on, what is already known about your focus before you start work Carry out a review of relevant research (including previous lesson studies), to identify a tried and tested teaching technique to develop or improve the agreed area of focus. *The focus for our Lesson Study triads this year will be ‘Growth’ as laid out in the school’s Teaching and Learning vision.

4. Identify 3 case pupils (or multiples of 3) Identify 3 case pupils. Each should typify a group of learners in the class – for example, high, middle and low attaining in the strand being taught and developed.

5. Jointly plan a research lesson based on the needs of the case pupils Jointly plan a ‘study lesson’ which uses, develops and closely studies the effects of the identified technique – while keeping in mind the case study pupils.

6. Teach and jointly observe the study lesson Focus on the case pupils’ learning and progress. Think about and agree key points you want to gather data on. Record this. Think about and plan who will be doing what and when. What questions do you plan to ask?

7. Interview the case pupils Gather the insights of the case pupils into the study lesson.

8. Hold a post lesson discussion Hold this discussion as soon as possible after the study lesson. Discuss how the case study pupils responded to the techniques, what progress they made and what can be learned about the application of the technique. What each person feels they have learned.

9. Find ways of helping others to learn from your Lesson Study By planning to share learning with others, you are ensuring the learning doesn’t just stay with you. People have found that by presenting their learning to others, they further their own learning and deepen their understanding of what they have learned. You can present your findings in a number of ways eg. through a public research lesson (as in Japan), a presentation, writing a case study which can be disseminated on this site. Dudley, P 2008, ‘Improving practice and progression through Lesson Study’ Routledge

Our focus All Lesson Study groups will have the research focus of ‘Growth’ as laid out in the Teaching and Learning Vision and introduced as part of this years Staff Training in sessions delivered by Will Ord, Helen Walker and Craig Lucas.

What stage our we at? As is hopefully clear from the staged framework above we are currently entering stage, 2. Identify your lesson study group, where we will be arranging ourselves into triads.

What next? We will have ‘dedicated time’ to share and carry out our review of research (associated with Growth), and to begin to collaboratively plan a lesson/ sequence of learning that will be used as part of the process on Monday 8th June (15.15 – 16.15).

Further Reading Should you wish to read up further about the programme the Lesson Study UK website is a great starting place: http://lessonstudy.co.uk, as is the Lesson Study Handbook (2014) available here: ‘Lesson Study Handbook (2014)’

‘A Growth Mindset’ – Dweck – Wider Reading

I thought best to assemble a collection of articles and blog posts that address Carol Dweck’s work ‘Mindset‘ (2012) in light of the impending series of ‘Whole School Training’ sessions on ‘Growth’. I hope they are useful.

– Professional Carol Dweck discusses ‘Teaching a growth mindset‘ at Young Minds 2013.

Fixed vs. Growth: The two basic mindsets that shape our life

– Maria Popova provides a clear overview of the difference between ‘Fixed’ and ‘Growth’ mindsets.

The power of not yet by @TeacherToolkit

– Mr @TeacherToolkit (Ross McGill) offers a practical applied example of the ‘not yet’ aspect of Dweck’s work.

Growth Mindset – So what’s next?

– Alex Quigley (Hunting English) looks beyond growth and its application in secondary education.

As always if you’d like to strike up discussion in response to any of this reading click the Leave a Comment button to the left of this post.

‘Talk for writing’

‘Your oral responses in class are excellent and show a high level of knowledge and understanding.’

I’m probably not alone in having given, written or shared the response above to a student in class or on a written report. Yet what typically follows (for me anyway) is a piece of written work that doesn’t quite ‘live up’ to the quality of oral response I often hear even if the task and/or question is identical.

This raises a wider and larger literacy issue that undoubtedly needs addressing – Why, at times, can’t our students… write? (When they evidently show a great understand when asked to respond orally). 

This led to some digging and some reading: ‘Talk for writing’ – Pie Corbett

What is (hopefully) clear from what Corbett suggests is that ‘talk’ is a powerful tool when aiming to develop or construct written responses; whether they be creative stories in key stage two literacy learning or essay responses for Media Studies or History at key stage 5.

As a result of this problem and the subsequent reading we ‘called’ a Lesson Study and five of us met to discuss this enigma and to explore the process of learning that takes place between a learner offering an oral response to them  having then having to convey their ideas on paper. We also aimed to devise and experiment with some strategies that we could embed into our classroom practice.

After two weeks we re-grouped and shared the following case studies:

English (Nicola Dobbs)

I wanted to target my 6th form as they are very perceptive orally but this doesn’t often translate on paper when writing essays. I had always assumed that the gap was a problem with planning as an essay needs to be ordered in a way spoken language isn’t and this was why there was a gap between oral and written ability.

I decided to record their discussions on the iPad so we could listen to them and sort then into an essay format. This didn’t really work as the background sound made the recordings difficult to hear in such a large group (17). After running the activity once (poetry speed dating) they gave up on the recordings and made notes as they had the discussions.

They found the most useful strategy was when someone made notes for them during the discussion. When they had to compare poems in their recent mock – the comparisons were good. However, this could be because they are older and better at recording information and note taking. The use of new technology didn’t work in this instance but I plan on using it with my bottom set year 10 to see if it helps them.

I also agree with our discussion that our questioning allows for better oral responses. As we said, we need to provide them with hooks/scaffolding techniques for then to structure their ideas in a written format and model the language we want them to use.

Business Studies  (Simon Bateman)

In Business Studies, a “dominoes” activity whereby Year 11 underachievers involved in after-school clinic were asked to collaborate on PEE paragraphs. The task is to construct a good quality paragraph in small groups, each student taking “pen” ownership for a single sentence, then passing on. Variations worked on since with the same girls and also with Year 12 have included each girl working single-handedly on the sentence or with assistance from others.

Results have been positive, including clearer understanding of what is meant by a quality PEE paragraph plus clear synergy in terms of the final outcome standard.

Media Studies (Craig Lucas)

I’ve been experimenting with using Lego to record and capture discussions. We (as a group) established some ground rules for how the Lego would be used to capture the ‘talk’ that was happening in response to an essay question that was given to the class. Longer bricks would be used to denote an important question/essay title (the foundation of the discussion), rectangular bricks would used to denote points made (they would be crossed to show disagreement and in line to show agreement) and square bricks would be used to denote a question. We then set about ‘recording’ our discussion and labelling each of the Lego bricks (with Post it notes) to signify what contribution was made. We discovered that we started to ‘build’ and develop points whilst exploring different strands or points in response to the question set and subsequently built our Lego in this way. 

Once the discussion had run its course the Lego building (pictured below) was reflected upon and deconstructed piece by piece. We the used each brick (points and questions) to restructure how this discussion would look in written form (acknowledging that a verbal response to a learning stimulus is often very different to a spoken one).

I feel this stagey helped immensely in a) providing ownership for the response (all points and questions raised were their own) and b) allowing the learners to consider the importance of structure in the writing they construct by providing a kinetic and visual medium in which to explore it.

There were negatives however, the process inevitably took an immense amount of time, however I feel that in future this will become more efficient once this strategy is more refined. It is definitely something I will be embedding across my practice with all key stages. 

A Lego representation of a discussion exploring the ‘impact of new media technologies on film production’.

What is clear is that some of the above strategies worked and some didn’t. What isn’t in doubt was the fact that this form of action research and this collaborative approach to professional development has all affected our practice in a positive way and although we haven’t discovered the code to this challenging literacy enigma we have gone some way to providing real world strategies for developing the concept of ‘Talk for writing’ in a secondary school context.

Please feel free to try, experiment with and share your own strategies by commenting in the usual way! (click Leave a Comment to the side of this page)

Teachmeet II – ‘Talk for writing’ in a secondary school context

teachmeet

noun

an informal gathering of teaching practitioners to share, collaborate and devise ways to improve our practice.

I think it’s fair to say that for the majority of us our learners will be required to share responses to their learning over the course of their education in exams by responding in written form (I can only think of Languages, Drama and until recently English where the oral responses to questions or tasks were used as a form of formal assessment and examination).

Yet over the past two years we as a school have been exploring how to develop the quality of ‘talk’ (Leading Learning through Talk programme) that occurs in our curriculums areas, largely as a result of the work done by the likes of Neil Mercer and Lyn Dawes (a collection of which can be found here) with some exciting results and findings.

But…

How can we now bring these two aspects of learning together? How can we use talk effectively to improve the quality of written responses our learners give?

In the second Teachmeet programme, due to take place on Wednesday 14th January and Wednesday 28th January in The Training Room we aim to explore these questions and their associated challenges. We will be:

– exploring the concept of talk for writing (Reading)

– providing a practical strategy of how we can use talk to develop quality written responses (Application)

and lastly…

– collaborating and planning ways to implement talk for writing strategies into our own respective curriculum areas (Planning)

We look forward to seeing you there!

Note! As detailed in Tuesday Briefing Teachmeets consist of two parts: an initial phase of Reading, Application and Planning (14th January) followed by a phase of Reflection, Evaluation and Replanning that will take place on Wednesday 28th January.

Lesson Study – Our Findings – Leanne, Michell and James

Lesson Study Context and Rationale This study was the progression from the earlier Year 11 Business Studies lesson. The findings of which have already been shared with staff. The lesson outline was not altered, with the exception of the starter activity and the use of the challengeometer, some very interesting findings came from running the same lesson with Year 7. We wanted to measure the impact that the Building Learning Power programme had had on our learners.

Triad members James Gaskell, Leanne Hughes, Michell Morrison and Richard Long

Subject DACT

Research Focus What impact has the ‘Learning to Learn’ programme had on Y7 students with regards how they approach their learning?

Class/students to be observed: 7I

Date of Lesson Study 10th December 2014

Learning Objectives To measure the impact of Building Learning Power and to explore the impact the learning skills programme has had on learning.

Lesson Activities Use tools provided to create an end of topic revision resource.

Lesson Resources Laptops, books, note books, pencils, question sheet (one person responsible for observation).

Resources (for wider use) Please find links to the resources used in the lesson by accessing the school staff drive here: S:\Subjects\DACT\L Hughes\Lesson Study with Y7 10.12.14

Reflections You can hear from all learners involved in the Lesson Study by clicking on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6kc3UNXmCI

What next? A fascinating find from this second phase of the Lesson Study triad was the impact that the learning environment had on the way the learners ‘went about’ the task they were given. It was concluded that the environment they were in and the learning cultures established in the respective subjects and spaces was hugely influential on the learning that took place.

As a result it was decided that it would be fascinating to explore this factor in more depth. The triad team (with the addition of Craig Lucas) are planning to conduct a third phase of this Lesson Study that will take place in an English classroom with a focus on exploring the impact departmental and subject cultures and learning environments have on this constructed phase of learning.

Stay tuned!

Teachmeet Reflection – ‘Establishing exploratory talk’

I thought best to kick off this blog post with the image/diagram below as, on reflection, it seems to aptly convey the sentiments of the group of us who met two weeks back to explore ‘exploratory talk’. It was clear that there was a general feeling of agreement about the need to develop oracy as a tool for learning and an enthusiasm for what the reading and the strategies that were shared could help create. I guess you could say as a result of the Teachmeet we have progressed through the ‘Awareness of new practice’ and ‘Superficial Practice’ phase of the pyramid that as the Teacher Development Trust argues are key parts of the journey in obtaining ‘Improved pupil outcomes’.

(c) NTEN

As an outcome from the first meeting we all agreed to ‘go away’ and experiment with the socratic discussion strategy for developing exploratory talk in our respective subject areas. Resources for observing discussion in a socratic manner were shared (these can be found in The Talk Toolkit that can be accessed by clicking on the resources tab above) to help support the planning of the learning.

By clicking on the LEAVE A COMMENT link to the side of this post you can read some of the outcomes, the impact, some further questions and the ‘takeaway’ we all had from the first meet. If you have anyting to share on the subject of exploratory talk, or in fact any questions please do join the conversation!

A Valid Landscape for Teaching and Learning by @TeacherToolkit

Everything Indexed @TeacherToolkit

Task: Read at least one a day… well at least the ones that haven’t yet been read!

Merely Good by @TeacherToolkit #SecretOfsted

A great reflective blog post by the man himself @TeacherToolkit. There is some real gold and insight shared here that not only provides some insights into the mechanics of the current inspection process but some ideas and scope to develop some strategies and changes to practice that need consideration… not just to ‘satisfy the inspector’ but strategies that could develop the quality of learning in our school!

Teachmeet I – ‘Establishing exploratory talk’

teachmeet

noun

an informal gathering of teaching practitioners to share, collaborate and devise ways to improve our practice.

‘But they do not only use the traditional, closed types of question, which limit children’s involvement with the powerful tool of talk.’ – Dawes & Mercer 2008

In the first phase of this Teachmeet programme, due to take place on Wednesday 5th November in Room 1, we will be:

– exploring the concept of exploratory talk (Reading)

– providing a practical example of what exploratory talk looks like in practice (Application)

and lastly…

-collaborating and planning ways to implement exploratory talk in our own respective curriculum areas (Planning)

As part of the session we will be reading and discussing some research conducted by Lyn Dawes and Neil Mercer titled: ‘The value of exploratory talk’ (2008). This reading can be accessed here should you wish to get a ‘head start’ prior to the session.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Note! As detailed in Tuesday Briefing Teachmeets consist of two parts: an initial phase of Reading, Application and Planning (5th November) followed by a phase of Reflection, Evaluation and Replanning that will take place on Wednesday 19th November.