Supporting Language & Content Learning in Math Transcript
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Tch
TeachingChannel
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Patricia Segura: So you're going to have a story and you're going to have a T-table together. Today you're looking at, what is happening with the numbers.
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Newcomer Instruction:
Supporting Language and Content
Learning in Math
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Patricia Segura: So today we're going to do a big task.
Patricia Segura: My name is Patricia Segura.
Lower Third:
Patricia Segura
9th Grade Math Teacher
Fremont High School, Oakland, CA
Patricia Segura: I teach algebra primarily to newcomers at Fremont High.
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Newcomers are 26% of total enrollment and
62% of ELLs at Fremont High School.
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Patricia Segura: Newcomer kids are students who've been in the country for less than a year.
Patricia Segura: You're going to have little cards with stories. Remember, we've been doing stories like Anna walking to the store, yes? So today, we're going to talk about Ken. Ken is a name, so don't get confused. Ken is a name.
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Patricia Segura: The biggest challenge in teaching the newcomer population is the extremes of education that we face when they come to us. We have kids who've maybe attended first or second grade in the same classes that we have students who've attended to eighth grade in their primary language. We've taken that and we've kind of cohorted students to have a closer range as to where their skills are.
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Patricia Segura: Resource manager, where are you? Resource managers? Good, good, thank you Kaylie. All right.
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Patricia Segura: They've been practicing reading graphs and what they needed to do now is make the connection between the situation, basically the story, and the T-table that was provided with them. So they were just making pairs of T-tables and situations and then we're going to build up on adding on the graph.
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Patricia Segura: So the first thing is? You're going to match the situation--
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Common Core State Standard
Interpreting Functions
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Patricia Segura: -- the story is a situation-- to a T-table. Your T-table, okay? Second, you're going to explain your reasoning to the matching to the teacher. So when you're finished with all five, raise your hand. I will come, ask you. You explain your rationale.
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Create meaningful situations.
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Patricia Segura: At this grade level, we try to make a lot of connections with real life situations. We've been using a lot of examples around, if you wanted to see how much money you spent paying your phone bill for six months. So they're able to derive different things from the T-table, given a real life situation.
Patricia Segura: The resource managers, you guys are going to ask the questions today. Remember, when you have a group question, you are responsible of raising your hand. Okay.
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Patricia Segura: We look at the Common Core. There's a lot of vocabulary and words in there that the student yet are to learn, so sometimes I scaffold the instructions or scaffold the actual materials. Today, I took out a whole page of the instructions and I just set three bullet points of what I wanted to do, rather than have them sit and try to decipher a page of instructions.
Patricia Segura: While you are matching up the cards, Miss Segura is going to be doing a participation quiz.
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Patricia Segura: The participation quiz is a way to document what student participation looks like in both positive and not so positive, to be able to redirect students when they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, and to capture any academic language that they're utilizing as a support, as a scaffold for other students to be able to see what they're saying and use it within their conversation.
Patricia Segura: You may start when you get them.
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Patricia Segura: The math team at OUSD has been working more with Common Core to do a lot of student centered learning, where we do a lot of things in group, and we have a lot of elaborate tasks, like the one from today, where students dive in.
Student: [Speaking Spanish]
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Patricia Segura: Ladies, I love what's happening here. Can you bring in the other two girls? Can you explain what you're saying here to them, so that they understand? Yes?
Student: Okay.
Patricia Segura: Thank you.
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Patricia Segura: Today the leap was going from a situation to a T-table which they had not experienced before. If I would have given them the graph, I think they would have made a much clearer connection faster, but that would have derailed from trying to make that connection with the T-table.
Student: [Speaking Spanish]
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Using teacher in English while allowing for
Student home language talk.
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Patricia Segura: So you're asking, how are we going to get the numbers from here, yes? Okay, so Ken is a person, and they are different stories, okay? It's not the same.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
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Patricia Segura: What was last time? You're doing pairs. Paris is two. So you need to look at the story and then remember, like Anna, it was increasing, then decreasing, right? So you need to look at the numbers. Are the numbers going up? Are the numbers going down? Right? And look at the story. What does it mean? You go to the story, you understand the story.
Student: Yeah.
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Patricia Segura: And you buy some chips.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
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Use oral, written and physical cues.
Patricia Segura: Right, in the past.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
Patricia Segura: No, in the past. "Bought" is "buy" in the past.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
Patricia Segura: Yes.
Student: Oh yeah.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
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Support productive struggle by identifying
Language demands.
Patricia Segura: Yes. So you know the words, but you don't know the past tense. Very good. I like how you articulated that. So start, started. It's in the past.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
Patricia Segura: Yes, good.
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Patricia Segura: There was a couple of things happening which was really clear, made clear by group four, where one of the students said, "I don't understand the story because everything is in the past tense." So they've learned the words of the scenarios in the present tense, but not in the past tense. And once I started deciphering certain, they were able to make that connection. So that's something I didn't foresee happening.
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Students: [Speaking Spanish].
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Patricia Segura: The benefit of allowing them to speak their primary language is that they were producing the math. I was able to hear the conversations that were happening and they were learning. They were learning, they were engaged. They were picking up things very fast and they're very analytical. It came out in their Spanish.
Student: [Speaking Spanish].
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Common Core State Standard
Reason abstractly & quantitatively
Patricia Segura: Okay. So this is where he starts.
Student: Yeah.
Patricia Segura: Okay.
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Patricia Segura: I realized that I should have gone through each one of the scenarios and clarified any vocabulary that they didn't understand prior to presenting the situations to each group. The next class that I taught, I changed the lesson, that I frontloaded those stories and situations, that they were able to decipher the T-tables much faster.
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Student: We think they came the first time. They're going to on this time the 40. He going to back of the four in the second time.
Patricia Segura: What do you mean, "he goes back?"
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Patricia Segura: We are early on in the year and the students just arrived maybe five, six months ago to this country and they've been in school for two months. So given that they will experience eight more months of this on a daily basis, by the end of the school year, these students will be asking questions in English and they will be answering questions in English, both written and oral?
Patricia Segura: [Speaking Spanish].
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Student: Pay more attention for T-table and this.
Patricia Segura: Situation?
Student: Situation.
Patricia Segura: Okay, so pay more attention?
Student: Yeah.
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Patricia Segura: It's been a journey to learn how to work with these students and teach these students. I've been doing trial and error for the past couple of years and it's just become an art of what you do, day in, day out, and just try to find the best way to meet each one of the student's needs at the time, to both serve them in their language and their mathematical skills.
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Patricia Segura: So from my observations, I would like to hear more talking from everyone. Maybe two people were doing a lot of the talking and the other two listening. And always, your practicing of English, okay? Thank you for your work together and we'll continue tomorrow. Okay? Thank you.
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Tch
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55 Comments
Constance Wright Mar 19, 2024 5:12pm
Ms. Sequra realizes when students begin to ask questions about the story being written in the past tense that she did not teach the present tense first for them to be able to make the connection to the past tense. Ms. Sequra used this knowledge to reverse her teaching of present and past tense for her next class.
Teresa Clark Dec 19, 2023 2:21pm
Avinus Calloway Sep 22, 2023 12:00pm
1. The benefits of allowing newcomers to use their home language during math class is that Ms. Sequra understands that if she allows them to speak in their language during this math class it gives clarification of the material to the students so that they are better able to engage in the lesson, have conversations with each other, and make real connection to the lesson.
2.How does Ms. Sequra scaffolld the instruction throughout the lesson ? Ms. Sequra scaffolds her lesson by giving the material in small pieces which allows the student to focus on just that piece of instruction, she also uses it as a tool to help students learn from other students.
3. What does Ms. Sequra learn about the language demands of this lesson, and how does she use that knowledge to alter her instruction? Ms. Sequra realizes when students begin to ask questions about the story being written in the past tense that she did not teach the present tense first in order for them to be able to make the connection to the past tense. Ms. Sequra used this knowledge to reverse her teaching of present and past tense for her next class.
Michael Daigre Sep 10, 2023 10:51pm
Ms. Segura allows the students to use their home language because the students were still able to work together and discuss the math problems. Because the teacher speaks English and Spanish she is able to listen to their group discussions. The teacher also knows that many of the students may have problems understanding English because it is not the students primary language. To offset this barrier she scaffolds the instructions so the students don't spend alot of time trying to read the instructions. However, during the group math assignment Ms. Segura notices that the students are still having problems reading the "situations" and has planned to use these observations to make adjustments to her lesson in the future.
Nakeisha Gardner Aug 20, 2023 7:01pm
1. The benefits of allowing newcomer students to use their home language during math class would be that they are able to articulate their responses in a group and partner setting in a language that they are comfortable speaking in.
2. Ms. Segura scaffold the instruction throughout the lesson by creating a more obtainable task for the assignment. She wanted the students to engage more with one another and be able to articulate in a clear manner so she made certain bullet points that needed to be discussed or addressed.
3. Ms. Segura learned about the language demands of the lesson, and that knowledge altered her instruction for the next class because she realized that the students did not learn about past tense and were having difficulty with the understanding how to complete the lesson. This realization led to her to review the vocabulary in the next class.