Teaching Math to English Learners Through the Colorado English Language Proficiency Standards

Teaching Math to English Learners

Workshop Overview

  • This workshop focuses on teaching math to English learners using the Colorado English Language Proficiency Standards (SELP standards).
  • The workshop is divided into two days, adapted from a face-to-face format.
  • Participants will have opportunities to participate in breakout groups.
  • Completion of both days earns six contact hours in specific standards for EL hour renewal.
    • Standard 2, Element A
    • Standard 2, Element B
    • Standard 4, Element A

Workshop Goals

  • Familiarize participants with WIDA (World Class Instruction, Design, and Assessment).
  • Understand WIDA's can-do philosophy and guiding principles of language development.
  • Learn strategies to teach the language of math to improve access to math content for all students.
  • Apply strategies in both face-to-face and remote learning environments.

WIDA Consortium

  • Colorado is part of the WIDA consortium.
  • WIDA creates the Access for ELLs test, used to assess English learners.
  • Colorado adopted the SELP standards from WIDA.
  • The WIDA consortium consists of 39 states, territories, and the Department of Defense Schools.
  • All members have adopted the English language proficiency standards developed by WIDA.

Can-Do Philosophy

  • Focus on the assets and contributions of English learners.
  • Acknowledge students' practices and beliefs from home.
  • Effective standard-based instruction.
  • Students build on the knowledge they bring from home.
  • Enhance everyone's learning.
  • Take everyone in the community to enhance education.
  • Cultural practices with their impact on learning and relationships with each other

Guiding Principles of Language Development

  • Language development occurs over time through meaningful activities.
  • Emphasize the interconnectedness of social, instructional, and academic language.
  • Recognize the value of students' languages and cultures.
  • Acknowledge the influence of first language (L1) on second language (L2) development.
  • Social emotional development contributes to student success.

Gathering Student Information

  • Collect information about students' language influence, academic strengths, educational history, family history, culture, and community.
  • Use student portraits to inform teaching strategies and scaffolding.
  • Example: Gustavo Portrait
    • Fifth-grade student, Spanish speaker from Mexico.
    • High scores in listening and speaking, lower in reading and writing.
    • Scaffolds: Using baseball statistics based on interests, using think time, content the student is interested in, reading word problems out loud, sentence frames. Helping him write his own word problems for a certain number of sentences using sports examples in partnership with another student.

Strategies for Gathering Student Portraits

  • Student questionnaires about their feelings towards math, strengths and weaknesses.
  • Google Forms for remote data collection.
  • Talking to previous teachers, ESL teachers.
  • Reviewing access scores and district assessments.
  • "Get to know you" activities, bringing a bag to decorate and putting three things that relate to their interests.
  • Contacting parents before the year starts to build rapport with them and with their student and also get some background information on them.
  • Family questionnaire for background information
  • Testing, the sooner the better
  • Observe conversations with student.
  • About Me poster
  • Family questionnaire and talking to previous teachers

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

  • Math is cultural.
  • Culturally relevant pedagogy empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural references to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
  • Three criteria for culturally relevant teaching:
    • Academic success.
    • Cultural competence for students and teachers.
    • Critical consciousness: empowering students to challenge the status quo.
  • Connect mathematics to students' communities and identities.
  • Tasks should empower students to challenge injustice.
  • Tasks should honor students' cultural and intellectual greatness.
  • Real-life stories and examples demonstrate connecting students and their communities.
    • Ex:Counting liquor stores in the neighborhood.
    • Ex: Making quilts tells a story about your life and connect to area and perimeter. So do the math.
    • Ex: Cornrows lesson using a book called Math is a Verb.
  • Framework for culturally relevant, cognitively demanding math tasks.
    • Teachers learned tasks are not culturally relevant in itself, it depends on the student.

Resources for Culturally Relevant Math

  • Bob Moses: Math as a civil rights issue & Algebra as a gatekeeper.
  • Gloria Lattson Billings: Teachers successful with African American students.
  • Peterson and Gutstein: Math for social justice.
  • Chappelle and Thompson: Math and Culture and Popular Media using clips from movies like The Pursuit of Happiness.
  • Remember what Cred Dodson says. He says, in our classroom, we don't teach math, we teach children.
  • Using a rubric to assess the level of cultural relevance.

Importance of Culture

  • Culture affects students.
  • Bringing culture into lessons can benefit students.
    • A study showed students who used tribe culture curricular materials outperformed those in the control group, being taught the regular math curriculum.

Features of Academic Language

  • Sociocultural context: language is closely linked to culture and involves interaction between students and their learning environment.
  • Language of math: focus on the language specific to math.
  • Language packaging: language expression that depends on text and situation.
  • Task or situation: how students will work together.
  • Social roles: influence the type of interaction.
  • Register: formality of language.
  • WIDA Standard 3: English learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the content area of math.

Language in Math Activity

  • Compare and contrast two favorite candies (example).
  • Thinking
    • Like what they like about each type of candy.
    • Why they can enjoy the candy.
    • What makes the candies similar/different.
    • Different occasions to eat one over another.
    • Different ways to eat candy.
    • What's on the inside versus the outside.
    • Visualize eating candy.
    • Remember a specific memory of eating candy.
    • Mouth watering
  • Language
    • Describe candies to someone unfamiliar.
    • Vocabulary: crunchy, chewy, smooth, sweet, gooey.
    • On the other hand.
    • Colors.
    • Names of candies/ flavors/shapes.
    • Similarly, just like, they both have.
    • My two favorite candies are blank and blank.
  • Transition words for similarities.

Cognitive and Language Functions

  • Cognitive functions: thinking skills (remember, analyze, evaluate, understand, categorize, create).
  • Language functions: language packaging that allows you to show understanding of the cognitive functions.
  • Examples from Colorado's math standards:
    • Cognitive Functions: Judge, Reasonableness, Comparing, Estimating, Analyzing.
    • Language Functions: Compare, Explain, Justify.
    • Understand the equivalence.
  • Equivalence is a foundation of math.
  • Students needed to show me equivalence is a foundation of math by explaining and justifying why two numbers, shapes, measures, expressions, or equations are equivalent.
  • Recognize problematic aspects of situations by presenting and defending solutions.
  • Explain the situation to show it is problematic.

Homework Task

  • Analyze a page from either:
    • Current standards.
    • 2020 standards.
    • District curriculum.
  • Highlight:
    • Content vocabulary in green.
    • Cross-content vocabulary in orange.
    • Language functions in blue.