My lesson study group consisted of 5 Humanities teachers. We taught at different schools, in different grades, but shared a common theme with our students. They struggled to find meaning in writing .  From pieces of writing we’d seen in class, to responses on feedback forms, students in large numbers were all showing us that they struggled to see the value in writing.  For our PDSA Cycle 1, we decided to ask our students to write a “Dear Writing” letter, where they write a letter to writing as if it were a person, and express their feelings about their relationships.  Below you can see student examples of their writing. Though some students enjoyed writing, the vast majority struggled to find meaning, just as we had thought. After many discussions about what we wanted our Equity Based Research Theme to be, we landed on one we all felt was critical to our success as teachers: How do we make writing more meaningful? We worked together to design a focus lesson that would bring an authentic audience to our writing.

For our focus lesson, students from my 9th grade classroom at High Tech High, would walk over to Felcia’s 9th grade classroom at High Tech High Media Arts, observe something they found interesting about the high school, and then create a postcard that they would send to their 9th grade HTHMA counterparts.  Our thought was that if students knew their writing would be read by their peers, and specifically peers they didn’t yet know, they might find the writing more meaningful.  Often in class, their writing would only be read by the teacher and then given a grade and that would be that. This lead us to our lesson hypothesis / theory of action: If their writing was instead the first communication they had with a potential new friend, we thought they might find more value and meaning in the act of writing.  The detailed lesson plan from our class can be found below.

For our focus lesson, students from my 9th grade classroom at High Tech High, would walk over to Felcia’s 9th grade classroom at High Tech High Media Arts, observe something they found interesting about the high school, and then create a postcard that they would send to their 9th grade HTHMA counterparts. 

Our thought was that if students knew their writing would be read by their peers, and specifically peers they didn’t yet know, they might find the writing more meaningful.  Often in class, their writing would only be read by the teacher and then given a grade and that would be that. This lead us to our lesson hypothesis / theory of action: If their writing was instead the first communication they had with a potential new friend, we thought they might find more value and meaning in the act of writing.  The detailed lesson plan from our class can be found below.

In addition to trying a new way for students to find meaning in their writing, we also wanted to focus on important content goals. In an era of social media and ever advancing technology, many students have not learned the skills of how to write a letter. We wanted to focus on teaching students how to format a letter (or in this case postcard), as well as learning the skill of selecting the important things to write down when there is limited space.  As Mark Twain once famously said, “I’d have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time.” We wanted to show students how to be succint with their words while still being impactful.

This focus lesson fit well into the project my students are working on this semester.   In my Humanities class, students are asking the essential questions: How does technology affect our behavior, and with all this new technology, is there still value in doing things the old fashioned way? To answer the second question, students have been writing postcards and letters to other students, penpals,  both locally and around the world.  Unlike our other penpals, it was great to be able to design the lesson with another teacher whose class would be writing us back.

Leading up to this lesson, I read research articles and wrote two pieces of writing that aimed at answering two questions. The first was our Equity Based Research Theme: How do we make writing more meaningful? The second was diving more into how long hours on phones and other addictive technology was affecting students’ attention in reading and writing.  Below are the two pieces of writing, titled RAR (Read, Ask Reflect) and RRR (Read, Read, Reflect) as well as an Annotated Bibliography.

After completing the lesson, I had the opportunity to meet with my team and debrief. It was great to be able to reflect on a lesson in depth with other teachers who had seen the lesson and hear their feedback about how it went.  I’m thankful my team was “hard on content, soft on people” because their critique helped me understand a lot about how I teach and we discussed possible ways that I could have retaught certain ares of the lesson.  

Something that stood out to me from the debrief/critique was the idea that my teaching style was great to help students get work done, but that I could use more work in challenging students to think more creatively on their own. For all of my postcards I have my students do, I make an example card, create the writing directions and show step by step what needs to be done. However, because of this, some of my students will copy what I’ve said word for word and only replace the bare minimum. In some ways, I feel like even if they do this, they’re still getting their work done which for some students is a big win, but I can also see how it may feel like an easy way for students to not truly engage in the work or attempt to develop as a writer. 

Writing Directions Slide

A specicif part of the lesson that we debried and shared ideas about was the idea of letting students choose their penpals and swap when they wanted someone different. The majority of my students didn’t know anyone at HTHMA, however there were some students who specifically wanted to write to their friends. I assigned students penpals from HTHMA randomly and gave them a spreadsheet with the names of their penpals.  Once we started creating the postcards, students kept asking me if they could switch their partners. I told them that if they could find someone they wanted to swtich with and commented such on the spreadsheet, I’d be okay with that. My thinking at the time was that it seemed like students were excited to write, and our whole goal was to try and create more meaningful writing, so why not? After reflecting, I realize that I confused excitment for meaning.  Somet students, with only 30 minutes left of class, hadn’t even started writing their cards as they were attempting to create a 5 person penpal trade to get the person they wanted.  They had got lost in the swaps and hadn’t started engaging in their work.  This also showed the challenge of not checking in with each student and not creating moments in the class where students needed to show their work - benchmarks with time limits compared to long stretches of free time. 

Though there was definitely room for improvement, there were also many highlights to the lesson. Students in general seemed more engaged, and many of the students reported they were excited to hear back from their penpals.  Almost everyone was able to complete their postcard on time, and people stayed during break to finish up, citing that they didn’t want to get left out when we all got postcards back.  Is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) a way to determine meaningfullness in writing? It’s definitely one way, but hopefully not the main driver. 

Overall, it felt that each student was able to create their own unique card, incorporate both writing and art skills, and students enjoyed the lived experience of being able to physically walk to a new school with a curious mindset.  It would have been great to spend more time on the content of what makes a good postcard “good”, and workshopping more of what is important to say in a postcard what is not.  We had already done this kind of class earlier on in the semester, but in retropsect spending more time on discussing as a class specific skills of communication through writing would have helped this lesson and the work that the students created. 

During my lesson study, I forgot to film... until the end. Here is me teaching, and simeltanously realizing that I forgot to film with about 35 minutes left in class.

Here is me pretending to do a re-teach during the last 10 minutes of class. Imagine this video, except with my teacher moves a bit more on point and the students a bit more... authentic.  That would be a good way think about how the REAL lesson went.