Team 1 was made up of four teachers -Çisem, Gökhan, Pelin and Yakup- all of whom volunteered to try Lesson Study out after hearing about it at ELT Fusion 1 from the Pilot Team.  As soon as the 2016-2017 Academic Year started, they got together and the process kicked off. Team 1 had Pelin from the Pilot Team who had experienced the process before and she acted in the team both as a practitioner and a facilitator. Because Lesson Study was being carried out at UTAA, DFL as part of İlknur’s -the researcher- PhD dissertation project, she was also there with them all the time to observe how they handle the Lesson Study process and offer them help when needed.

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Step 1: Introduction to Lesson Study

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Meeting 1

When Team 1 first met, they didn’t feel the need to get to know each other because all of them had been working together for some time, and Çisem, Gökhan and Yakup shared the same office in the school. Although knowing each other personally, they recognized that they had no idea who they were as teachers ; as professionals teaching English. Deciding that they had to talk about this before going deep into the process, they thought it would be a great idea to write a reflective paper about their philosophies of teaching. As the researcher, İlknur prepared a set of questions for them so that they can reflect on

• their conceptualization of learning and teaching,

• their goals for students,

• how they implement their philosophy in the classroom,

• and what their professional growth plan is.

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Click here           for “My Philosophy of Teaching” document.

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Team 1 decided that once everybody finished writing about their philosophies of teaching, they should upload it to Google Drive so that they could read one another’s reflective papers and get ready for the discussion till the next meeting.

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Apart from that, they talked briefly about what lesson study was and how they could put it into practice during the fall semester. They had a guidebook written by Bill Cerbin, which would be read chapter by chapter as they progressed through the process. The first two chapters “Introduction and Overview of the Lesson Study Process” from the book were discussed in this first meeting.

 

Here is the full reference for Cerbin’s book:

Cerbin, B. (2011). Lesson study: Using classroom inquiry to improve teaching and learning in higher education. Sterling: Virginia. Stylus Publishing.

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Meeting 2

In their second meeting, Team 1 had a lengthy discussion about

what kind of a teacher they believed they were, why they did

what they did in the classroom as teachers, and so on.

This, they believed, enabled the team to build a safer

environment for group work.

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Considering the student profile at UTAA with reference

to their educational backgrounds, their conception of the world

and their attitude towards learning English, they also discussed

some possible research topics. Before closing the meeting

the team agreed that it would be perfect if they could keep a

record of all the meetings in one place, so that they could refer

back to them whenever they wanted. İlknur provided them with

a meeting minute document. They also decided to upload

all the meeting minutes to Google Drive.

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Click here           for the meeting minute template.

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Meeting 3

Third meeting started with a discussion of chapter 3 entitled “Getting Started and Finding a Focus” from Cerbin’s book. All the points in the chapter not fully understood by the team members were clarified so that the team could reach a common understanding about the terms and concepts in the book.

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Feeling worried about how they would function as a group, Pelin, drawing from her past experiences, suggested that they should develop group norms and roles and a protocol to begin and end each meeting. İlknur provided them with all this document that they needed.

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Click here           for group norms, roles and the meeting protocol.

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Next thing they did before the meeting finished was to think roughly about how to find a research topic. It was decided that everybody would think of at least three research topics of their own to share with the group in the next meeting.

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Step 2: Finding a Focus

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Meeting 4

Interestingly and luckily enough, three of the team members (Pelin, Çisem and Gökhan) were teaching ENG-105 Academic Presentation Skills to different groups of freshman students. Yakup was teaching ENG-205 English for Logistics to a group of sophomores, who also took ENG-105 almost a year ago.

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Click here           for ENG-105 syllabus.

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Click here           for ENG-205 syllabus.

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In both of the courses, students had to do presentations. So, the research focus was almost certain in their minds: “presentations”. But as everybody shared their research topic with the rest of the team, they recognized that paraphrasing was a big challenge for all of the students having to deal with formal presentations. Taking the curriculum and institutional goals into consideration, they thought they had to prepare students to be more autonomous presenters who had the skills and abilities to modify their speech according to the audience to which they are addressing. This, they agreed, requires a detailed and intensive outlook on the presentation process.

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Until the next meeting, everybody agreed to find a research question of their own, focusing on what they believed needed to be given careful thought within the scope of the Lesson Study project.

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Meeting 5

Fifth meeting commenced with a discussion of everybody’s research

question. Some of the questions were;

• What types of paraphrasing do students use in their presentations?

• Does the knowledge of converse substitution improve students’

       paraphrasing skills?

• How does teaching paraphrasing skills help students in academic

       presentations?

• Does story building with an Improv activity help students in

       paraphrasing skills/improvisation skills?

 

After extensive discussions about which research question to focus on, team members thought that it would be a great idea to ask other teachers’ opinions about the team’s research questions. They decided to go and ask how teachers giving the same course would feel about the team’s research question.

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The meeting ended after Chapter 4 “Designing and Planning the Research Lesson” was discussed by the team members.

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Meeting 6

Sixth meeting was important for the team since this was when the research question was finalized.

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“How do students transfer a given text into an oral presentation?”

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This research question, the team believed, was directly addressing to what Cerbin calls “expert blind spot” - the large gap between teachers’ own understanding of the subject matter and that of their students. Team members agreed that as part of the ENG-105 and 205 courses, they wanted their students to conduct research about a topic to present, and by synthesizing the information they gathered as a result of their research, they wanted them to create a speech that would facilitate the presentation process. But what they mostly observed in their classes was that students were inclined to depend too much on their notes which complicated the presentation process rather than facilitate it. This tendency to read everything from their notes was thought to result from the fact that students did not know exactly how to transfer a given text into an oral presentation although this is what teachers had been instructing them to do all the time and over and over again.

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A careful look at the curriculum revealed that this was an issue not addressed by the curriculum goals, most probably because it had been taken for granted by the teachers and the curriculum developers. Believing this was just the right kind of research question to be asked, team members felt they were ready to design their first research lesson around this question.

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Before planning the research lesson, the team agreed on a specific lesson design suggested by Cerbin. Problem/Case Based Lesson Design was considered appropriate for the kind of research lesson the team envisioned. It had five different steps;

1. The teacher presents a problem (or case, question, task, issue, etc.) to the class.

2. Students work in groups to propose solutions and discuss how they arrived at them.

3. The teacher provides an overview of solution strategies.

4. Students attempt to solve a new problem alone or in groups, and then discuss their solution strategies.

5. The teacher leads a summary discussion of solution strategies.

 

Step 3: Planning the First Research Lesson

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Meeting 7

Seventh meeting was all about developing the lesson aims and objectives as well as specifying what to include in the different segments of the lesson such as warm-up, lead-in, main assignment, assessment and closure.

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Trying to write lesson aims and objectives proved quite profitable for the team, giving them the opportunity to brush up on their past knowledge about how to develop aims and goals. This was a time when team members had to face a big challenge because of the fact that they didn’t have to think deeply about aims and objectives which might be a result of their not being accustomed to designing written lesson plans in their daily routines.

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Meeting 8

During the eight meeting, texts to be used in the lead-in,

main assignment and assessment parts of the lesson were

analyzed. Each member came to the meeting with suggested

texts among which the most appropriate ones were chosen.

Since UTAA is specialized in aeronautics and astronautics,

and since ENG-105 and 205 students were from the faculty

of air transportation, aeronautics and astronautics, and

business management, all the texts were essentially about

aviation.

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Meetings 9 and 10

Having chosen the lesson design, developed the lesson aims and objectives, agreed on the segments of the lesson and finalized the texts, the team was now ready to write the whole lesson plan, which took two meeting to complete.

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In these two meetings, each and every thing about the lesson was discussed in great detail, making sure that everybody is satisfied with the end product. All the materials to accompany the lesson were carefully designed, proofread and edited. In addition to the aviation texts, a PPT was also designed with pictures and visuals that would serve to attract the students’ attention.

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Meeting 11

During this meeting, Chapter 5 from Cerbin which was about

“How to Study a Lesson” was read and discussed.

Since all of the lesson would require group work, 2 seating

plans (one for the main assignment task, the other for

assessment) were arranged by Çisem, who

volunteered to do the first research lesson.

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Click here           for the seating plan template.

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Observers decided whom to observe with the help of Çisem, who identified three case students who varied in their academic abilities and in-class performance. An observation sheet was also designed to help observers take detailed notes during the lesson.

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Click here           for the first version of the observation sheet template.

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Meeting 12

Since the research lesson would be video and audio taped, they had to obtain students’ consent, and prepare an informed consent form for this so that students would be briefed on the research lesson. Çisem took the consent form to her class a week before the research lesson, told her students about the lesson and got them to sign it.

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Click here           for the Informed Consent Form for Students.

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İlknur took the responsibility of video recording the lesson, and got all the necessary arrangements done.

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Case students observed during the research lesson would be interviewed right after the lesson by Çisem, so interview questions had to be arranged. The team created a set of interview questions to be asked to the case students.

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Click here           for the interview questions.

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Çisem went over the finalized version of the lesson plan and asked any questions she had about the procedures to be followed.

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Click here           for the lesson plan for the first research lesson.

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Click here           for the PPT of the first research lesson.

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Step 4: Implementing the First Research Lesson

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Before the first research lesson was implemented, team 1 decided that students should be video recorded and observers should do demo observations in the classes in which a research lesson was to be carried out. The underlying reason behind this decision was that students might get disturbed by the camera and observers, and behave differently as a result. İlknur offered help to teachers at this point and video recorded three of Çisem’s lessons, two of which were observed by other team members. The number of demo recordings and observations was reduced to two later on in the process. The team thought that only two demo recordings one of which would also serve for the purpose of demo observation would be enough.

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A mini reflection meeting was done after the demo observations so that team members would share with each other their ideas about the students to be observed, the content of the lesson and the atmosphere of the class.

On the day of the first research lesson, Çisem went to her classroom almost half an hour before the lesson was supposed to start. Other team members accompanied her, and helped her arrange the desks for the group work. They wrote the names of the students on the desks so that everybody would get seated easily. Observers got seated near the students whom they would observe. İlknur set up the camera for the recording, and she was also going to take pictures.

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The first research lesson lasted approximately one and a half hour.

During the break, observers had to change the places of the

students for the assessment task, so they rearranged the desks, and

showed students to their new seats. As soon as the research lesson

was over, İlknur took a whole class photo as a memory of the day,

and Çisem asked the case students to stay in the classroom for

another 10 minutes or so. One of the team members stayed with

Çisem, to arrange the interviews. Çisem interviewed three students

one by one, and audio recorded them.

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Click here           for a sample interview (in Turkish).

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It was the well-earned celebration time.

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Step 5: Reflection

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Meeting 13

The first meeting after the first research lesson started with the discussion of Chapter 6 “Analyzing and Revising the Lesson”. Having read the chapter, the team decided that for them to be able to reflect well on the lesson, they should first get prepared well. Before the next meeting, they agreed that they would

• watch the video recording of the lesson

• listen to the audio recordings collected from students and observers

• listen to the audio recordings of interviews

• go over their observation notes

• go over the student notes çisem collected at the end of the lesson

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And on the day of the first reflection meeting they would seek answers to the following questions;

• What did students learn as a result of the research lesson?

• How did they learn?

• Why did they learn?

• How did the lesson work?

• How did the lesson support student learning, thinking and engagement?

 

Meeting 14

This meeting was called the debriefing meeting and was designed to analyze the lesson without focusing on how to fix it. Team members, following Cerbin’s advice, decided to understand the lesson first before trying to offer suggestions on how to modify the problematic parts.

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As the one who did the first research lesson, Çisem was the facilitator of the meeting and she was the first to talk about the lesson focusing on 5 questions previously agreed upon. Çisem’s comments were followed by the comments of the observers.

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Having identified the strong and the weak points in the lesson, the team now felt ready to fix it for the next research lesson.

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Meetings 15 and 16

These meetings were called the drilling down meetings, during which the team could revise the lesson plan and modify the materials.

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The main problem with the lesson was thought to be about instructions. Because students were unaccustomed to working in groups and following the instructions of the teacher, Çisem had to repeat what she wanted them to do many times. To eliminate this problem, it was decided that it would be better if instructions were projected on the board.

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The PPT was redesigned, the texts were simplified, and the observation sheet was reorganized in a way that it would be more user friendly.

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Click here           for the final version of the observation sheet.

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Meeting 17

During this last meeting before the second research lesson, the lesson plan was roughly analyzed one last time, this time Gökhan went over the lesson plan, carefully rehearsing it before his turn to implement it.

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Gökhan shared the seating plan with his friends, and made sure that they knew whom to observe. The case students to be observed and interviewed were discussed more in detail.

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Click here           for the lesson plan for the 2nd research lesson.

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Step 6: Repeating Steps 4 and 5

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The second research lesson

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The second research lesson was going to be implemented in

Gökhan’s class on 23.11.2016. Therefore, İlknur video recorded

two of his lessons on 07.11.2016 and 21.11.2016 (this one was

also observed). And a mini reflection session on the same date

of the demo observation was held.

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The second research lesson lasted 80 minutes and it was analyzed in the same way as the first research lesson. After the debriefing meeting (Meeting 18) and the drilling down meetings (Meetings 19, 20, 21), the team decided to improve the lesson plan in some aspects.

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For one thing, it was decided that the lead-in text used in presenting the problem had to be implemented in a different way.  The text itself was okay, but the way it was put into practice in the classroom did not yield to as productive results as the team had thought it would. So, the team decided to integrate the text into a video.

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Click here           to see the video.

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Another thing was about the timing of the tasks, the students were required to do two tasks during the research lesson, and these tasks had to be completed in a certain period of time. But it was observed that students had difficulty in keeping track of time, thus they time-wise failed to work efficiently. To eliminate this problem, for each task the team decided to embed a countdown video into the PPT which would serve as a timer, and help students manage their time better.

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Click here           to see the PPT for the 2nd research lesson.

 

The third research lesson

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The third research lesson was going to be in Pelin’s classroom, so

upon receiving the signed consent forms from her students,

she went through the demo video recording and the demo

observation processes on 28.11.2016 and 05.12.2016 respectively.

The mini reflection meeting was done after the demo observation,

as well. On 07.12.2016, the team’s third research lesson was

carried out by Pelin, and case students were interviewed

right after the lesson.

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During the next four meetings (Meetings 22, 23, 24, 25) the third research lesson was analyzed and by modifying the third lesson plan, the lesson plan for the fourth research lesson was finalized. Some of the modifications were;

• Since the last research lesson was going to be carried out in a classroom of students from the department of logistics, some minor adjustments had to be made in the visuals used and the PPT. To boost student motivation and engagement, the warm up section of the lesson and the visuals were geared to the needs of those specific students.

• The design of the assessment task was slightly changed so that students would organize and present their product in a better way.

 

Click here           for the lesson plan of the 3rd research lesson.

 

Click here           for the PPT of the 3rd research lesson.

 

The fourth research lesson

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Yakup was going to carry out the research lesson in his classroom

on 20.12.2016; therefore, demo recording and observation were

consecutively done on 13.12.2016 and 14.12.2016. And the team

got together for a mini reflection meeting on the same day of the

demo observation.

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The fourth research lesson was 80 minutes long, and as soon as

it ended, case students were interviewed.

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The team got together one last time (Meeting 26) to analyze the last research lesson and share their reflections. Since this was the last research lesson, and no additional changes were going to be made in the lesson plan, the team had only the debriefing meeting, and had discussions with reference to the 5 main questions they were meant to focus on.

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Click here            for the lesson plan of the 4th research lesson.

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Click here            for the PPT of the 4th research lesson.

 

Step 7: Sharing the Results

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Meeting 27

During Meeting 27, the team discussed Chapter 7 “Documenting

and Sharing Lesson Studies” from Cerbin’s book and mainly

discussed if they have learnt something that would be of interest

to other teachers working at UTAA. To understand this, they felt that

they had to look over all the evidence they collected during the four

research lessons again including;

• video recordings of research lessons

• audio recordings collected from students during research lessons

• student notes collected from students at the end of each research lesson

• observation sheets

• audio recordings of student interviews

 

They also decided to document their lesson study work so that it could be preserved for future use and other teachers can critique, use and build upon it. The team decided to use the “Final Lesson Study Report Template” from Cerbin’s book to write up their final report.

 

Click here           for the final lesson study report template.

 

Meetings 28, 29, 30 and 31

During four meetings, the team totally concentrated on writing

the whole report. This was a great opportunity to refer back

to the whole process and discuss their lesson study experience.

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Initially, the first two parts of the report –background and the

lesson: how to teach the lesson- was written. In order for the

final part which was made up of the approach, findings and the

discussion to be completed, the team first had to decide how to

categorize the findings. Once all the evidence had been revisited,

the team came up with major patterns and tendencies in regard to

their research question. Everybody agreed on the categories and how to name them before they were included in the final lesson study report. For most of the findings representative examples of student learning and thinking were also added to the report.

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The report was proofread by İlknur and edited by one of the group members. Before it was printed, the team thought that it would be nice if a teacher outside the group could read it as well. They asked a fellow colleague to read the whole report and offer any suggestions. The report was, therefore, edited one more time.

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Click here           for the final lesson study report.

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Meetings 32, 33 and 34

Those last three meetings were devoted to preparing the ELT Fusion presentation. ELT Fusion is a two-day event organized by and for teachers themselves working at UTAA. It is held twice a year, at the end of fall and spring semesters. It is an in-house organization where teachers share their professional development experiences during a semester.

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Click here           for ELT Fusion 2 poster

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For the team, this was an exciting opportunity to share their lesson study experience and their findings with the rest of the teachers.

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They first decided on the content of their presentation dividing it into 6 main sections and they later on specified the details they should definitely talk about for each section. The sections of the presentation were as follows;

• Step 1: How we Started?

• Step 2: Finding a Focus

• Step 3: Planning the 1st RL

• Step 4: Implementation & Reflection

• Step 5: Repeating Step 4 (Before-After)

• Step 6: Sharing the Results

• What Makes Lesson Study Valuable?

 

Çisem presented the introduction and Step 1. Gökhan was the next person to get on the stage to talk about Steps 2, 3, and 4. After Gökhan, Yakup briefly mentioned how they repeated Step 4 emphasizing the changes they made throughout this process. He finished his speech by presenting the results of the study. Pelin concluded the presentation by sharing with fellow teachers why Team1 believes Lesson Study is valuable as a PDP option.

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Click here           for the final presentation

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