Lesson Study Team: Michelle Goings, Michelle Fleming, & Katelyn Livingstone
Research Goal:What opportunities can we create through online learning that encourage engagement, participation, and discussion among students in our math class?
Theory of Action: If teachers provide students with UDL structures such as sentence stems, group work roles, and multiple modes of access to communication (chat, sharing screen, using pictures, and verbal), then students will feel empowered and willing to lead discussions in math, resulting in deeper discussions and more positive math identities.
Equity goal: Students will listen to, value, and build off of each other’s mathematical ideas during group work.
Click on the link below to view parts of the lesson and my reflections!
In a time when communication is impacted by uncharted challenges, facilitating discussion in middle school math class is a process of trying, observing, revising, and reflecting. Our students are faced with obstacles such as navigating new and more frequent technology, learning in a new (and at times unstable) environment, and an inability to see the faces of peers when trying to communicate. In this context, it is imperative to adjust teaching practices to support students in feeling confident and prepared to participate in math discussions. Collaborative group work in breakout rooms gives students opportunities to share ideas in a lower stakes setting than in the whole class while also allowing more space for individual voices to be heard. Working together in small groups is a key process in student learning as they share, build, evaluate, and question ideas. In our study, my team researched ways to support students in breakout room group work. Our research and data collection focused on the use of group work roles as a means to elevate students with low mathematical agency and help them access discussion in both small groups and whole group settings.
Strategies that Support Group Work in Mathematics There are several explicit strategies that our team implemented in order to support all students with accessing academic content and participating in discussion. Group work is a powerful key to unlocking brilliance and achieving deeper thinking in math. Assigning group work roles is one way to ensure accountability and provide a clear structure for all students (Boaler 2019). Inspired by roles detailed in Jo Boaler’s Limitless Mind, we began by introducing the coach. The coach’s responsibility is to choose a speaking order, encourage everyone to share, and make sure ideas are heard. After 2 weeks of practicing with this role, we then introduced the scribe. This role was specifically designed with our focus students in mind, as we wondered how to provide a low stakes mode of communication that still helps students feel successful and allows opportunities for their voices to be highlighted. In our study, the scribe’s task was to write down ideas shared during breakout room discussion of strategies used to find the area of a circle. Through discussion, students can learn to build on one another’s ideas and reach deeper thinking on their own if they have the tools to make connections and value one another’s thinking (Toshalis et al 2012). Providing our focus students with a clear and accessible task of listening to and documenting mathematical ideas leads them to deeper thinking. It also gave an opportunity to highlight those students in the whole group; for example, in the whole group share, I was able to say, “(Focus Student 1) wrote that one strategy their group talked about is…”. Thoughtful implementation of group work roles provided the foundation for our study and allowed us to observe and collect data around positive engagement in breakout room discussions.
Mathematical Agency Supporting students with developing mathematical agency is central to good teaching, and support looks different now that we have transitioned to an online environment. For some of our students, there are fewer natural opportunities to cultivate agency, and so our study focused also on creating ways to elevate all voices. One such strategy is consistently referring to students as “mathematicians” to help build a positive identity and understanding of self as brilliant and capable. (Coleman 2020). Constantly searching for ways to showcase ideas and frame student thinking as interesting, useful, and smart helps students see themselves and each other as collaborators. Another way to help students access mathematical content is to clearly teach new academic vocabulary and allow students to practice using it. In Math Language in Middle School: Be More Specific, Powell and Stevens highlight the nuances of different subjects in math and urge teachers to use accurate language when teaching and provide students with structures that help them understand how and when to use specific vocabulary (2019). In our lesson, we warmed up with an activity where students had access to a word bank of vocabulary like radius, circumference, diameter, and center. We encouraged students to use this list to analyse and describe common circular objects, then select one and describe why it doesn’t belong. Warming up with this exercise provided students with an easy way to practice using vocabulary and to hear it spoken in context by classmates and me. We observed a lot of participation from all students in this activity and I was able to celebrate ideas from focus students and quiet students. Moving forward, I will continue to use and build on these strategies that give opportunities for all students to be heard and feel successful.
Listening In trying out strategies and evaluating success, it is useful and necessary to ask for feedback and listen to our students. Our study centered around both helping students listen to one another, and valuing student input when designing lessons. When students feel like their voice is centered in a leadership role, they feel more confident, responsible, and a sense of belonging (Toshalis et al 2012). One way we honored student perspectives was through asking for feedback about how group work is going. Students brainstormed and shared ideas about what works well, what they like about group work, and what they don’t like. The whole class viewed and discussed the commonalities of the feedback together, which helped create a sense of buy in when we launched roles. Listening to children and acting on what we hear allows us to create, modify, or adapt curriculum to best meet the needs of our students (Minor 2019). After carefully considering the feedback, we introduced the role of the coach, and asked for volunteers who were willing to try it first. This allowed more reserved students to have a chance to see the role modeled several times and become more comfortable before stepping in to the role. In smaller groups and with the support of roles, students are encouraged to listen to one another and engage in mathematical discussions without the facilitation of a teacher (Brooks et al 2013). We saw this play out successfully in our study as students spoke directly to one another in the whole group discussion and named ideas after the person who shared them. We are still growing in breakout room work and hope that with practice and continued support, the group work roles will help all students feel more confident leading discussions on their own.
Reference List
Boaler, J. (2019). Limitless mind. A limitless approach to collaboration. New York: HarperCollins. 165-201.
Brooks, L. A., & Dixon, J. K. (2013). Changing the rules to increase discourse. Teaching Children Mathematics, 20(2), 84-89.
Goffney, I., Gutiérrez, R., & Boston, M. (Eds.) (2018). Rehumanizing Mathematics for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Students. (Annual Perspectives in Mathematics Education; Vol. 2018). National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press. Minor, C. (2019). We Got This. Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Powell S. R.Stevens E. A.Hughes E. M. (2019). Math Language in Middle School: Be More Specific. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Toshalis, E., & Nakkula, M. J. (2012). Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice, (23-29), Students at the Center: Teaching and Learning in the Era of Common Core.