Math Essentials was a course offered to students as an option to enhance number sense and 6-8th grade math skills in high school. I used a variety of different sources to create material for these students to give them access to this content as well as content from the next year in Math 1. Among these sources included Desmos, the Open Up curriculum, and I created means for checking in and reflection. In addition, since most of this class had emerging multilingual students, I worked with an old friend to explain the content in Spanish to make sure the content was accessible to to all my students.
In conjunction with tradition math assessments like quizzes and tests, I am a huge fan of projects and in this class we created board games as a final project.
Integrated Math 1 Lessons
On our campus, we teach Integrated Math and I was fortunate to teach Integrated Math 1 for two years. This subject consisted of 9th grade math standards for algebra, geometry, and statistics. I used a combination of restorative circle check ins, interactive demos, projects, discovery based activities such as Desmos, lecture, interactive notebooks, Khan Academy and quizzes to deliver this content.
Introduction to Data Science Lessons
Introduction to Data Science is a wonderful course in which students learn numerical methods and programming methods to ask and answer statistical questions. It is very different type of course that calls for a wide variety of teaching methods and assessment. Over the years we have used interactive notebooks, plugged and unplugged activities, papers, posters, presentations, and so much more. Each year I have modified the curriculum to open up access more as well as raise my ceiling of expectations.
For example, to help support multilingual speakers and students with special needs, I created lab sheets with sentence frames and code skeletons to not only scaffold syntax students, but allow them to focus more on the core concepts of selecting desired inputs for their desired outputs. I found that the lab sheets had more elements of Universal Design for Learning and helped support all students learn deeper.
In raising the floor, I modified the assessments to have more creative freedom so that students can ask their own statistical questions, collect their own data, and answer it using the methods we used in class. This past year I introduced Data Science portfolios where students compiled their work over the year and were able to showcase their work to the class and other experts.