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Ryan Kile, Anaheim High School
Ryan Kile, Anaheim High School
In his practice as a high school math teacher at Anaheim High School Ryan centered culturally relevant teaching and frequently used technology in his lessons. He sought to make math relevant, exciting, and accessible to all students, particularly his emergent plurilingual students. The intentional use of translanguaging, however, was not at the forefront of his teaching. Through Project LEARN, Ryan saw his valued pedagogical practices amplified. While he continued to enact culturally responsive teaching, Ryan also began to strategically include ways for his students to leverage their full linguistic repertoires in the classroom.
Lesson: Exponential Functions
Lesson: Exponential Functions
Below, you will find Ryan's capstone assessment, "Create a Bank Advertisement," which focused on the use of exponential functions. Students' intentional and creative lanugaging approaches are visible, as is their clear use of mathematical concepts.
Create a Bank Advertisement
Create a Bank Advertisement
For this assessment, students were explicitly required to use more than one language in their project. Initially, many students were hesitant to do so, as they were accustomed to only using English in math assignments. To address this, Ryan encouraged students to brave up, and held a class discussion about the importance of trust and communication at a bank. He emphasized that members of a bank want to feel that their bank understands them and can communicate to them how their money will be handled. Therefore, banks must make themselves linguistically accessible to all of its patrons. This accessibility is often key to creating a successful bank with happy patrons.
Through this discussion, students began to see their languages as an asset, and were eager to leverage their full linguistic repertoires to create their bank advertisement.
Student Examples
Student Examples
To successfully complete this assessment, students used exponential functions to create a 1-, 5-, and 10-year savings plan based on a competitive interest rate of their choosing. For each savings plan, students included the equation and graph they used to calculate the value of the customer's amount for each plan. Students created a name and slogan for their bank, and used a wide variety of images to make their advertisement appealing to customers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Below are three examples that visibly and creatively demonstrate students' use of languaging to create their bank advertisements. As they leveraged their full linguistic repertoires to complete this assessment, Ryan noticed students' increased confianza in themselves and their ability to engage in complex, real-world mathematical problems.
What are your goals beyond Project LEARN?
What are your goals beyond Project LEARN?
"Moving forward, my goal is to continue to incorporate language strategies in class that provide improved learning outcomes for students that have fluency in more than one language. Project Learn has helped me become more aware of the benefits of students using all of their linguistic repertoire as a tool to learn in school."
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