Identify Your Long-Term Goals
Assess where you want to be and compare it to where you are.
The Building Blocks of Your Theme
A research theme expresses the long-term goals of your work. If your team or school has already developed a research theme, revisit it now to refresh your memory about your long-term goals and ideas about how to get there.
If your team has not yet developed a research theme, begin by thinking about your long-term goals. To spark your thinking, you may want to have a copy of your school or district vision statement nearby. If you plan to focus on a specific content area (e.g., mathematics, civics), documents that spark your thinking about long-term goals of these disciplines will also be useful.
Begin by having team members individually jot down qualities in response to the following prompt:
- Ideally, what qualities do we hope students will have when they graduate from our school? ( If we bumped into our students in 5-10 years, what qualities do we hope they would have?)
After a few minutes of individual think time, share your lists and write all the qualities on a board or poster paper titled “Ideal.”
Now, again working individually, spend a few minutes jotting down a list of qualities in response to a second prompt:
- What are the current qualities of our students? (For example, what qualities of our students inspire us? Anything that concerns us?)
Again, share your individual lists and write all the qualities on a second list labeled “Current.”
Compare the two lists–ideal and current–and notice gaps that really speak to you as educators. Find one or two gaps where you would like to invest your time and energy.
Your research theme positively states the qualities you will work toward. Some examples follow.
- “For students to value friendship, develop their own perspectives and ways of thinking, and enjoy science.”
- “Develop social-emotional skills and…a deeper understanding of mathematics”
- “Across both math and language arts, develop our students’ abilities to use evidence and reasoning to support and critique arguments.”
- “…to take responsibility and initiative as learners.”
- “For students to develop strong academic skills that guarantee their advancement and a rich sensibility about human rights.”
The last research theme above is drawn from a Japanese elementary school serving students historically subjected to discrimination, and it illustrates how educators use the research theme as a way to focus on the particular students they serve.
The research theme helps a Lesson Study team keep in mind its long-term goals. As U.S. educator Cindy Ann Black says,
A lot of [U.S.] schools develop mission statements, but we don’t do anything with them. The mission statements get put in a drawer and then teachers become cynical…Lesson Study gives guts to a mission statement, makes it real, and brings it to life.
If you already know the subject area focus of your Lesson Study work, it is fine for your research theme to focus on just one subject area (such as mathematics or language arts).