Educator Cross-Share

Linda Ruiz Davenport

Boston Collaborative High School

Mathematics

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The Challenge(s)

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What are the challenge(s)?

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How to engage students in a meaningful exploration of mathematics standards in ways that do the following:

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1. Keep students coming to class*
2. Help students acquire a strong conceptual foundation for targeted mathematics content
3. Help students develop some procedural fluency with that content; and
4. Create opportunities for students to see themselves as capable mathematical sense-makers who can succeed in mathematics.

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What was I curious about? �

• Would a meaningful context that allowed students to draw on their “funds of knowledge” from life outside of school be more engaging and provide more opportunities for sense-making?

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• Would an authentic question to motivate the work create deeper and more sustained engagement in the learning and allow them to thoughtfully contribute to everyone’s learning?

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• Would it be possible to create opportunities for students to share their thinking with each other and support each other’s progress?

What I Tried:

Our 15-Minute Community Project

I used Mayor Wu’s 15-Minute Neighborhood Initiative https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g8_XqpQHNxdb26ilyxxgsB0XYahbnpCy/view?usp=sharing to create a project about each of our own neighborhoods.

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The project required students to make ppts that did the following:

• Identified and introduced their 15-minute neighborhoods;
• Identified 3 successes and 3 challenges using CER including data to support each claim; and
• Identified how they could contribute to their 15-minute neighborhood by addressing one of the challenges.

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The plan was to share our projects with Mayor Wu during a coffee in a South Boston park at the end of May.

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To help students learn what this could look like, we watched the TED Talk A Guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA (https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerrilla_gardener_in_south_central_la/transcript) to set the stage for using claims, evidence, and reasoning to make assertions about our neighborhoods.

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I expected that…

And what actually happened was…

Students would find and represent data specifically for their 15-minute neighborhoods using at least each of the following:

• Histogram
• Pie Chart
• Box and Whiskers Plot that identified any outliers
• Frequency Table
• Scatter Plot with line of best fit and correlation coefficient *

as well as other representations of data that made sense.

I expected students to show what they were learning about collecting and representing data, random samples, central tendency, and issues of outliers as they did project work.

Students initially found online data for Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, Rozzie, East Boston, and South Boston but these data did not specifically represent each of their 15-minute neighborhoods.

Students initially expressed opinions about what was working or not working in their 15-minute neighborhoods and used photographs to support their claims, but where was the evidence we needed to know your claim was true?

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Some initial efforts . . .

Early Impact

So I started to notice a shift as students...

more deeply investigated questions about their neighborhoods, more thoughtfully engaged in discussions about where to find the data they needed, and more successfully found and represented data to support their claims.

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What I Learned

Key Ingredients: What Made This Work?

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• Students had to think carefully about the specific claims they were making about their neighborhoods in light of the data they were able to collect or create so each claim was convincingly supported.
• Students had to think about which data representation made sense for the data they wanted to use to support each claim and even in some cases created a novel data representation.
• Students had to think about contributions they could make to their neighborhoods that addressed the challenges.
• I needed to think flexibly with them about finding and representing neighborhood data that typically involved crosswalking between their neighborhood map and other maps and sometimes involved stepping away from conventional data representations.
• I needed to create a rubric that answered the question “Am I done with my project?” so students could see where they were in the process and how to finish.

We also took time to explore MCAS items from practice tests that addressed the standards we were addressing in projects such as:�

Next Steps...

Next Steps:

With each project, there are opportunities to learn about who students are thinking about the content of the standards, where they have confusions, and and where they need support.

If I were to do this project again, I would be more explicit about the focus on their specific 15-minute neighborhood, what it means to generate data, what it means to represent data to support a claim so it is convincing to someone else. I would also introduce brief periodic routines where we look at a claim, analyze the data related to that claim, and discuss if the data convinces us (or not).

I would also make more time for students to report out on their progress and also more time for students to collaborate. For instance, “Jannet is building a histogram to show the categories of restaurants in her neighborhood and how many of each there are . . . Can anyone who’s done their histogram collaborate with her?”

Finally, I would continue to make connections between Math MCAS items that address statistics standards and the work they are doing on the project since the Math MCAS will be here soon!

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