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Catherine Manalo, Dale Junior High School
Catherine Manalo, Dale Junior High School
After completing her teacher education program, Catherine Manalo, a middle school math teacher at Dale Junior High, began to engage in translanguaging practicres with students in informal conversations and provided language surveys throughout the year. Throughout her involvement in Project LEARN, Catherine continued questioning the construct: inclusiveness for plurilingual students. Catherine worked to stretch herself and her students to utilize their full linguistic repertoires as they engaged in complex mathematical analysis and problem-solving.
Unit: What Makes Someone Happy? - Bivariate Plot Project
Unit: What Makes Someone Happy? - Bivariate Plot Project
Below, you will find some of Catherine's instructional materials for this unit, including numerous scaffolds intended to support students as they stretched their linguistic repertoires and developed mathematical analysis and reasoning skills.
Introducing Bivariate Data
Introducing Bivariate Data
To garner students' interest in the lesson, Catherine first began by asking students, "What does happiness mean to you?" Using Jamboard, students each created a slide with words and images depicting what makes them happy. Included in the slides below are Catherine's example, which she used as a model for students, as well as two student examples.
Analyzing Graphs + Handout.pdfScaffold: Analyzing Graphs and Charts
Scaffold: Analyzing Graphs and Charts
After gaining students' interest in the topic, Catherine provided students with a variety of graphs to introduce the concept of bivariate data. Together, Catherine and her students analyzed the graphs together. This activity continued to build upon students' blossoming interest in statistical data while also setting the stage for further inquiry and data colletion.
Gathering Data: The Happiness Scatter Plot
Gathering Data: The Happiness Scatter Plot
Next, students selected one variable that they believed would increase or decrease someone's happiness and formulated it into a research question. To assist students with creating a research question, Catherine included sentence starters in both English and Spanish. Then, to test their hypothesis, students randomly surveyed 30 different people about their chosen variable and recorded their responses in the accompanying chart. For additional data, respondents also gave a number describing their level of happiness for Catherine's students to record and analyze.
The Happiness Scatter Plot.pdfHow Happy Are You_ - Happiness Scatterplot Template.pdfPutting It All Together: Happiness Scatterplot
Putting It All Together: Happiness Scatterplot
The culminating assessment for this lesson was the creation of a happiness scatterplot. Here, students used mathematical skills to analyze their survey data and created a scatterplot using Desmos. To support students' critical mathematical thinking, analysis, and reasoning, Catherine included numerous sentence frames in English and Spanish. Students were encouraged to complete their responses in any language(s) they chose.
Rubric
Rubric
To assess students' learning, Catherine designed the accompanying rubric. Students were assessed on their ability to gather data, construct their scatterplot, accurately interpret the data, and reflect on their work throughout the unit. Additional credit was given to students who chose to present their work to the entire class.
Rubric for Happiness Scatterplot.pdfStudent Work
Student Work
The following slides contain examples from seven different students in Catherine's class. Happiness variables that students investigated included phone usage, time with friends, and lack of sleep. In many of the examples, students leverage their plurilingualism to help them make sense of and successfully complete each activity.
Courage and Connection
“ I have noticed that when I genuinely brave up, it is instantly a memorable moment for everyone. The entire classroom community shares that moment and then there's this relationship that we all share that is incredibly strong.” - Catherine Manalo
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