The students sat according to the seating plan during the research lesson.  Each of the observers, Eda, Çisem and Hatice sat with a different group near a previously chosen case student (each case student with a different achievement level) and while observing the classroom as well as the case student, took detailed notes about whole classroom’s and case student’s learning, reactions to the instructions and their attitudes. Meanwhile, the research lesson was being recorded by one video recorder in order to collect the essential data to be used in the debriefing and analyzing stages later on. The research lesson lasted one lesson hour plus 10 minutes break time (55 minutes in total). Following the lesson, 6 students from 3 different achiever groups (low-mid-high) that have been pre-arranged by the instructor were interviewed in Turkish and the interview was recorded as an audio file to be listened by the observers and to be used in the debriefing session.

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Click here           for the Interview Questions.

Step 5: Reflection

After the first research lesson, firstly the instructors read Chapter 6 “Analyzing and Revising the Lesson”. After reading, the instructors had a deeper understanding on how to analyze and revise the lesson plan. Before passing to the reflection meeting, they talked about the first research lesson by sharing their thoughts and feelings and went through their observation notes. Then it was the time for the first reflection meeting. During this debriefing meeting, they discussed what went well, what went wrong and how they can improve for the next rounds. First, the practitioner explained what went well, what went wrong, what he would like to change about the lesson, how did he feel during the lesson. Then the other observers made their explanations one by one answering the same questions. The instructors also talked about the interviews and they shared opinions on what to implement or what to extract from lesson plan for the following lesson. The instructors also shared their opinions with the other instructors based on their observation notes. Next, the changes were made to the first lesson plan: The picture drawing activity was also changed, the White board markers were to be used since the pictures that have been drawn via pens or pencils proved too small to show the pictures to other groups. Second: The matching activity has grabbed no attention and the students stated in the interview that it was ineffective. Therefore, this activity was changed into a simpler and shorter matching activity. Finally, the explanation of figurative and literal meanings of the idioms was implemented into the lesson so that students would differentiate each meaning and they would be more aware of what to do during the picture drawing activity. After these changes were made, the lesson study group was ready for the second cycle.

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Step 6: Repeating Steps 4 and 5

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​The second research lesson is conducted by Eda, who had the mid level class of the study. For this lesson, the team did not do major changes in the activities; however some minor changes were made to increase the student’s interest and applyability as indicated in the previous step. First of all, the lesson time was expanded to one and a half lesson hour so that the story part could be implemented. In this way, the students had enough time to process their knowledge and produce more sensible outputs. Secondly, the necessary aid for the instructor to control the activities was provided by the other team members. For instance, synchronously managing the idiomaire game PPT, observing the students’ responses and noting down the scores required another instructor’s assistance, therefore, it was solved. With these changes, Eda conducted the research lesson, and the team received better results in implementing their lesson plan. Students had a better understanding of what was going on.

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Lastly, it was Hatice’s turn to conduct the third lesson plan for the final cycle. Since her class had higher achievement profile than the first two, students could respond to the directives more easily and fast than the previous two classes. Even though the students did not display any major trouble in participating the activities, there has been some time that the self-confidence led them into misunderstanding. However, they solved this in the group activities, produced a great amount of outputs, and so, they could obviously contributed to our research, too.

Step 7: Sharing the Results

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In the next meeting, the team gathered all the results from the three research cycles and made a list of ideas as answers to their research question. In the light of these ideas and the experiences gained from these cycles, they had a fruitful discussion and came up with useful ideas and conclusions for their future classroom practices. Grasping a distinctive way than the previous LS studies, team 6 has also focused on instructor’s practices and techniques, and thus, they added this aspect to their final discussion partly as a peer-feedback session.

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The team decided to write their final report based on the directions and suggestions in the last chapter of Bill Cerbin’s book which is “Documenting and Sharing Lesson Studies”. Therefore, they specified the sections and divided the work to be written. Each member wrote their own section of the report individually, then they combined and finalized the report.

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Click here           for the Final Report.