Lesson Study for Moral Education in Middle School History: Teacher and Student Outcomes

• In Event: Lesson Study for Professional Development of Teachers to Integrate Moral Education Within Middle School History

Abstract

The paper presents analyses of outcomes from using Lesson Study for professional development of 10 urban middle school teachers to integrate moral education within history lessons. The control group, seven teachers who attended the initial project workshop and activities, did not participate in the research lessons integral to the lesson-study process. The 17 teachers were district designated teacher leaders drawn from separate schools. All 148 students participating in research lessons were assessed for development.

Lesson planning and reflection. Video recordings were conducted of nine monthly lesson-planning meetings among participating teachers distributed across 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade teams. Transcribed discourses from teacher meetings were analyzed employing a coding scheme adapted from Murata, et al. (2012). This analysis captured shifts in teacher discourse regarding lesson goals, connections to student’s emerging conceptions of morality and societal convention in relation to the focal topic, and strategies for structuring student discourse to enact those instructional goals. Analyses revealed shifts in leadership from a dominant voice to shared contributions to lesson construction, increased willingness of teachers to welcome criticisms and suggestions from colleagues, ease with which groups identified issues for sociomoral growth within the curriculum, and adjustments in lesson structure in response to self-identified areas for improvement. Analyses also revealed tensions that emerged as teachers constructed lessons such as tensions between goals to generate controversy for moral discourse and concerns to avoid promoting immoral or distorted views of history.

Lesson enactment. Video recordings of an exploratory and two research lessons per team allowed for analysis of lesson enactment. This included analyses of whole-class and small-group transactive discourse (Berkowitz & Gibbs,1983). Preliminary analyses revealed nearly universal engagement of students in classroom discourse and minimal off-task behavior. Levels of transactive student discourse was higher than among the control groups in AUTHORS (2015) but appeared to include a lower ratio of operational to representational transacts because the lesson study generated protocol requirements for paraphrasing. Teachers viewed paraphrasing as essential for discourse comprehension and a positive trade-off for potentially reduced ratios of operational transacts.

Student outcomes. Students’ levels of moral, social conventional, and coordinated reasoning about overlapping domain scenarios were obtained in June at the end of the school year using written essay assessments employed by AUTHORS (2015). Analyses are ongoing.

Teacher survey outcomes. In June, participating and control teachers completed a modified measure of teacher self-efficacy (Milson, 2003) for moral education and a questionnaire regarding beliefs about teaching practices for social development. Participating teachers had significantly higher self-efficacy scores (participating M= 81; Control M = 69.1; t = 2.75, p < .02). They also had higher levels of knowledge and greater endorsement of teaching practices consistent with development than controls. Participating teachers rated the project 4.35 on an 8-item, 5-point Likert scale with 5 the highest score. All participating teachers indicated they would use the research lessons developed in the project in their teaching this coming year. In written comments, teachers requested that their district adopt lesson study as the approach for Professional Development (PD).

Author

• Deborah Powers, University of California - Berkeley