Arifacts from my Residency

On this page, you can find documents, activities, and resources I created for my students this year. My takeover consisted of covering Unit 7 Quadratic Functions in the Core Plus textbook. In this unit, students learned about quadratic motion, quadratic patterns, how to factor and distribute factors of quadratics. They finished the unit with an introduction to the quadratic formula and what the pieces of the quadratic formula means.

Sample Lessons and Worksheets:

Example Artifacts:

Anchor charts / Self-designed student activities / Challenge Problems / Progress Charts

SOCS Distribution Descriptions Anchor Chart

Big Idea for Next Year

Project Overview:

For next year, I have been inspired to mix a 9th grade statistics unit with "start-of-the-year" executive functioning development. Students would be given a folder or binder at the beginning of the year. They will choose a class or course that they want to develop and commit to organization for the duration of the project period. After the first week of planning and setting up organization structures with the students (binders, a folder system, storage clipboards, etc.) as well as choosing a hypothesis of the results, students will keep track of various sets of data such as grade performance or time to be prepared for their chosen class, as well as one other course of their choosing to use as a placebo data. Then, at the end of the data collection period (3-6 weeks), students will describe the statistics using visual display of a 5 Number Summary with accompanying graphs (box-plots or histograms) of both the chosen and placebo datasets, as well as a formal write up of their results. As a class, we can then discuss sample statistics relationship to population statistics.

Essential Question (My own hypothesis!): Can having students organize their work and keep track of their academic coursework improve student outcomes and/or classroom management?

Product/Audience: Ideally, students would present their findings and graphical displays to their parents/guardians and any other support the student may want to have present. Because of the sensitive data (grade performance), this project may not be appropriate for a full school-wide exhibition, however, the timing works out for the first set of Student Led Conferences, Back-to-School nights, or parent-teacher conferences. This could also help form some buy-in from parents to encourage their students to continue through the rest of the year, as well as extend their practices to other courses.

Key Learning Goals:

Students will be able to collect data and describe the data using a five number summaries, box plots, histograms, and standard deviations.
Students will be able to form a hypothesis and compare their hypothesis data set to a null or placebo data set.
Students will be able to interpret the differences between the data sets and determine if their hypothesis is supported by them
Students will be able to effectively organize their own school work

End of Year Reflection

Now that my residency year is over, I have had time to identify my strengths and weaknesses as a growing teacher and reflect upon them with the help of my support team from San Pasqual and High Tech High. My strengths tend to lie in both the topical understanding of math but also in my ability to work with students in small groups and design activities for those groups that are interesting, rigorous, and in different modalities and formats. Informal assessments and activities where students get to practice their skills are where I shine and funnel much of my passion for mathematics and games. As for my weaknesses, I struggle to give instructions clearly and concisely the first time, and need practice giving them to a group of people before giving them to my students. In an attempt to mitigate this and overcome this weakness, I have started writing out scripts for myself beforehand if there are activities with large amounts of instruction or steps. I also have committed to tracking data of my interactions with students and table groups to ensure that I am reaching all of my students and not accidentally favoring attention to some students over others. Last but certainly not least, it is a personal goal of mine to improve my own understanding of certain learning disabilities such as dycalculia so that I can better accommodate my students who may need that specialized support.

A question I have mulling around for my M.Ed. Capstone:

How might I engage my students' critical consciousness around the mathematics and topic of income inequality, economics, and the 1%?

In other words, how can I get my students to think critically about the ever-growing income inequality in the United States, the loss of the middle class, the lack of affordable housing and rising costs of living, etc.? These issues are sure to impact my students if they haven't already, and a lot of it can be looked into mathematically and socially.