Lesson Study, Cycle 2: Literature Synthesis

How can we build academic confidence in students in order to build their language fluency?

Language fluency in the history classroom consists of academic language distinct from that of the English Language Arts classroom. As a result, students may find themselves struggling with reading comprehension in this subject area even if they are strong readers in other contexts. In order for students to tackle this challenge head on, it is important that they “have both the will and the skill” to succeed (Pintrich & De Groot, 1990, as cited in Kasch, 2019). Our lesson study team hypothesized that one way of ensuring students had both the “will” and “skill” would be to enact teaching strategies designed to build academic confidence. To that end, we also focused our research on the use of educational standards to support the principles of Universal Design for Learning. This was done in an effort to understand the connections between the access and engagement promoted by UDL and the specificity of standards-based lessons.

Conducting research on these topics was useful when designing this lesson plan as it brought three particular themes to the forefront: (1) the importance of building a strong community of learners, (2) the centrality of specific goals to a UDL lesson, and (3) the usefulness of scaffolds with multiple means of representation for learners at all levels—including teacher-researchers.

While some may view language fluency and academic vocabulary acquisition as individual undertakings, the classroom community can have a great effect on students’ learning in this realm. Each year, students enter our classrooms with individual histories and feelings (both positive and negative) toward the subject matter (Krall, 2018). In order to support students who carry the weight of years of negative experiences with the content, teachers can turn to research-based strategies to cultivate a classroom community of learners. While some of these strategies are more focused on individuals, many also target the perceived “pecking order” of the classroom and seek to disrupt the status problems therein. These strategies include the practice of calling out patterns of inequity in classroom participation and ensuring that praise is “public, specific, mathematical [or content-specific], and true.” (Krall, 2018). These two practices in particular can work together to increase academic confidence. By calling students’ attention to patterns of inequity, teachers can bring these hierarchies out of the shadows. In turn, the use of effective praise not only gives students the academic confidence they need to participate more fully—it also encourages them to actively fight against those patterns of inequity they are now beginning to see more clearly.

This community-centered approach is also reinforced in the Cambridge Design Lab’s focus on empathy, hearing from all “stakeholders in a design process,” and recognizing and reflecting on the “wide range of experiences with respect to learning and education” that are present in any classroom community (Chardin & Novak, 2020). In addition, Chardin and Novak (2020) repeatedly highlight the importance of student voice—voices that are strengthened not only when they are offered a chance to speak but also when they are presented with a genuine audience that is listening. While authentic audiences for student work are often members of the broader community, it is also true that students are constantly evaluating their own place within the classroom community.^[1] In response to this research, our team chose to provide students with the opportunity to choose from a variety of countries to study. Students were thus allowed to study a country they were interested in or to study a country in the peer community of their choice.

If students’ understanding of their place in a classroom community helps prime them for learning experiences, then goal setting is a critical tool for reinforcing or breaking down that understanding and changing or perpetuating that “priming.” Setting clear goals lays the groundwork for students to clearly see their progress towards those goals—a practice of reflection central to both UDL and the design process (Chardin & Novak, 2020). In this way, clear goals are the foundation for clear progress and growth. Goal setting is also where standards become useful in UDL lesson planning (Chardin & Novak, 2020; Rao & Meo, 2016).

Though standards can be framed as restrictive, when combined with UDL they can instead offer specific goals to be achieved using the three principles of UDL: multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action/expression (Chardin & Novak, 2020; Finnegan et al., 2019; Rao & Meo, 2016). In order to ensure that standards are used effectively in a UDL lesson, however, teachers must understand how to approach these standards. One approach laid out by Rao and Meo (2016) is “unwrapping standards,” which involves breaking a standard down into “skills” and “concepts” and then applying each principle of UDL to each constituent part of the standard. This process makes standards more understandable for teachers and creates clear opportunities to include multiple modalities. It also makes opportunities for multiple forms of formative assessment clearer—an addition to the three core principles of UDL made by Finnegan et al. (2019). In other words, the practice of unwrapping standards helps teachers recognize that these standards are focused on goals rather than methods, materials, or even assessments—it helps teachers dig into the list of standards and see, as Chardin and Novak (2020) put it, “that ‘read a paperback of Of Mice and Men or The Great Gatsby’ isn’t on there.” In the case of this lesson, unwrapping the Common Core standard “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary describing political, social, or economic aspects of history/social science” led us to a narrower focus on determining the meaning of political vocabulary (namely, ‘fascism’).

Building a strong community of learners and having clear goals are often focused more on the early stages of a lesson. During the lesson or unit, however, having appropriate scaffolds in place for students will help them access content. For students that don’t have much experience with scaffolds, there can be a bit of hesitation and worry that the work will be “too easy.” This phenomenon was documented by Kasch (2019) while studying language acquisition, but the focus for most students was not on the work becoming too easy for them—rather, they were concerned that their peers might take advantage of the scaffolds (Kasch, 2019). While this particular study did not refute those fears directly, one particularly strong piece of evidence that the learning demands weren’t too low was the fact that students generally expressed “delight” rather than “boredom” while utilizing scaffolds (Kasch, 2019). This evidence bolstered our belief that including scaffolds like multiple modalities for students in this lesson would provide them with more access to and deeper understanding of the material, ultimately resulting in stronger academic language fluency.

In addition to this, there was a metacognitive element to many of these articles in that they integrated the UDL principles by presenting information in multiple modalities for teachers. While teachers were not afforded audio or video recordings, these articles included a flowchart to help teachers apply UDL (Chardin & Novak, 2020), visual representations of Hyrle thinking maps (Finnegan, et al., 2019), and more. These tools offered by the authors not only gave examples of how teachers might begin integrating these scaffolds into their assignments, but also reinforced for readers how helpful it can be to be given a visual representation of your goals. If we, as teachers, can begin to find ways to do this more consistently, we may be able to capitalize on students’ assets in the classroom, build their confidence as they realize their power and voice, and know exactly what is being asked of them. And once students have this foundation, learning vocabulary and building language fluency will begin to get easier for them every day.