Our team’s hope during the planning of this lesson study was to design a lesson that would revolve around effectively engaging students and encourage collaboration.  This lesson was completed over distance-learning which presented its unique challenges altogether.  Our team set our hopes in providing multiple avenues of opportunities for our students to feel comfortable in accessing their prior knowledge and participating in the conversation. Despite the multiple opportunities to participate and share knowledge, we observed that we did not see the level of engagement that we would normally expect of a face-to-face setting.  With distance learning, we are constantly adapting to the needs of our students, which led us to read the latest articles in hopes of navigating these unexpected challenges and times.  

 

As a team, we noticed that this particular method of learning makes it difficult for students to build off each other’s ideas, and have conversations with other students during the ongoing meeting.  At times, it seems as though the teacher can only have one ongoing conversation with a particular student at a time and not with the whole class.  To aid this particular problem the class was able to share their ideas in breakout groups that created some success in sharing prior knowledge and the building of ideas.  

 

Each particular part of the lesson was designed to spark interest in the subject matter since it was a ‘launch’ lesson for a unit of instruction. During the lesson debrief we reflected on the student thinking exhibited during our initial inquiry of student knowledge of the Maya civilization. We also reflected on the multiple accurate distinctions the students were able to make between the artifacts that were Mayan and those that belonged to other civilizations.

 

During those distinctions, our host took the opportunity to disrupt a Euro-centric idea in the conversation that European was more sophisticated than Mayan art. After hearing that European stone art was deemed more “advanced” than Mayan stone art (both made at the same time), the host graciously stopped the conversation and talked about the language we use when describing art.  A point was made about how this language can be misinterpreted as judgment and the implicit bias towards non-White ideals.  The students had the opportunity to reflect on how both pieces were different but one wasn’t better than the other.  We hope that this conversation will have a positive impact on the students that participated in this lesson. 

 

Ultimately, while designing future lessons with distance learning in mind, we hope to create meaningful and engaging lessons in which students feel comfortable to share their knowledge. We now understand that during this time in distance learning, participation can have multiple meanings such as using chat features, reactions, hand-raising, un-muting, and students turning on their cameras.  Together, students and teachers are discovering a new way of learning together and we are excited to trailblaze in these times of uncertainty.