Kansas
The CASAS Competencies used in Kansas Adult Education programs include Communication(0.1, 0.2, 4.6), Effectiveness in Working With Other People (4.8), and Demonstration of the ability to use thinking skills (7.2).
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
The EMPower lessons required my students to talk to one another in ways they
were not familiar with. Before using this book, I would ask a question and
the students would give simple or brief answers. They were afraid to give a
reason for their answer.
After we started doing lessons from the Many Points Make a Point book, they knew I was going to ask them why they answered the way they did. I would also ask them to explain to me how they came up with an answer. This got the students interacting with each other more often. They would discuss how to solve the problem or the difficulties they were having working certain problems.
This communication carried over into other subjects and lessons too!
Effectiveness in Working With Other People (4.8)
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept
come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
When my students were sorting their graphs, the enlistment of all in the various groups (both high functioners and low functioners) was amazing. It was sort of the concept of “worker” bees and the “queen” bee. One person would throw out a category to be considered and the others would thoughtfully consider it. This continued until all of the graphs were sorted and categorized. My lowest functioning student was actively participating in all phases of this activity. The presentation phase to the whole group was a source of pride for each group. They were so proud of their work! None of the groups had duplicate categories. I think the students were quite amazed at this.
Watching students learn can be interesting and fun. Before the TIAN Institute, my students enjoyed working alone or would much rather work as a whole group.
Most of my students enjoyed working alone simply because of the comfortable setting. During lessons, I often expressed how quiet the classroom was and desired a change greatly.
During the whole group setting, the classroom still seemed quiet because no one would volunteer or raise their hands in order to ask questions. This atmosphere seemed boring not only to me, but them as well.
Now, since the TIAN Institute, my classroom setting has changed. Students work together and would much rather be in groups than by themselves. It’s fun watching them because they are freely jumping into the excited work mode. They even ask to be in groups now. Many times, students can be seen sitting together before class starts. They usually have their GED books opened while discussing homework assignments. I can truly say…the classroom isn’t quiet anymore.
While working on Data and Graphs lesson my students started out working individually but as they progressed they began sharing and assisting one another. In past lessons they have worked individually because they had different agendas or goals. This time however it became necessary for them to communicate between themselves in order to accomplish their objectives. Because of the small size of out class it was easier for them to work together collectively and share information.
It was very exciting to observe my students work together as a team, helping each other solve the problems they were working on and taking turns in expressing their ideas during the group discussions. My classroom setting is designed for individualized instruction, so this opportunity was especially gratifying for all of us. One of the surprising outcomes to me was that a couple of the learners took a “leadership” role that I would not have anticipated, and that was interesting to observe.
Students worked in groups of three on the project of taking the “Clothes in the Closet” bar graphs and converted them to circle graphs. They were grouped so to try to have a low-a middle-a high achiever in the group.
Following the instructions in the student text on p 37 they did well. As I watched one group, one student was giving the directions and the other two were doing the cutting, taping, etc. I was glad to see each person involved and no one was being spectator.
Once the circle graph was colored the high achiever said to me, “ I suppose you want us to find the percents.” I replied, “That is a great idea. Go ahead and show the others how to do that.” I needed to help her get started but she took it from there.
I work with lower-level math students. When working on the project about favorite foods I asked them to write down 4 of their favorites on post-it notes. I then asked them to put the foods in categories. I thought they might struggle with this, so I helped them get started. To my surprise, they came up with six different categories to divide the foods. They proved to be more creative than I had imagined.
The students that we have at our agency come from all walks of life. During my graph lessons I observed my students working together as one. In the class, even though it is small, the students usually stuck to the people that they felt more comfortable with. As the lessons went on, the students started to work as one group instead of small mini groups. The students who usually kept to themselves slowly started to merge with everyone. When it came to the point when the students made their bar graphs and converted them over to circle charts they were all working together. They were helping students who were at a lower level in math understand what was going on and letting them know that the concept of converting was also hard for them and that it is okay to not grasp it all at once.
Our students work on this math project five days a week for forty five minutes at time and seeing how they talk and help each other out is amazing. I had students giving directions that I never would have expected to step up and take charge. This not only brought the class together in my class but I observe them in other classes and they are doing the same thing.
The first time we used the EMPower books was the time that sticks out for me. Two of my students were sitting next to each other, probably not by choice. (They had issues that hadn’t quite been resolved.) As we went through the lesson, I encouraged students to help each other and share thoughts. At one point I saw student 1 showing student 2 how to do the chart we were working on; they were working together as if they’d never had their previous problems. I quickly realized one of the most important things about this project, and that is the students have their own books. It is fundamentally different from using the program’s textbooks. Those two students—and others—greatly benefited from the community aspect of the books and lessons.
Demonstration of the Ability to Use Thinking Skills (7.2)
Please share a story about how you saw or heard this core concept come alive for students during the Data and Graphs lessons.
In the Clothes in Your Closet activity, after putting the surveyed information on the board and discussing as a group how the data could be organized, it was very interesting to see how the students organized the data even though the categories were not the same. They put the same general information in each category. What was even more interesting was when I asked the students to graph the data after they had been put in groups. What I found interesting was that those students who did not know how to do it, the other students helped. There was communication and assistance given to strangers, (because I did this the 2nd day of class when new students had entered the class). This same type of communication followed when we worked with circle graphs. Beyond learning they were communicating and discussing with each other. I feel as a result of this the students were more open to working with data and graphs and understood it more. Once the students were done I had them present the data in a different way by having 2 boxes represent 1 data item, in this way they learned to duplicate data, that it can be enlarged, but mean the same thing. We had a class discussion about it and even though they didn’t like it. The students were learning that data can be presented in different ways, this led to a discussion on how data can be manipulated based on how we want the data to look to others. It was really amazing to see them start to think that data can be manipulated.
The students were working on median & they were trying to come up with an explaination on how they would describe the concept. After bouncing stories back & forth, the story that made it click was about the smurfs.
“Smurfette was trying to find a suitor & she had too many smurfs to pick from. She asked all the smurfs (who are males) to get in a single file line & she would make her choice.”
“In her mind instead of walking up & down the line pick one smurf, she would pick the smurf in the middle. To determine who was in the exact middle, she asked the outer smurfs to come and grab hands. When all the smurfs on the end came to grab hands 2 at a time the line became smaller & smaller. Until finally one smurf, in the middle had no one to hold hands with, that was the one that smurfette picked to be her suitor.”
The story actually developed from 1 student who was watching some dating show, & she said if she was a contestant, she would have had a hard time picking 1 person because the guys are always cute.
Another student said to pick the tallest one, another student said to pick the one with bigger hands. Jokingly a student said to pick the one in the middle; hence how the story of the smurfs developed.
The students were given a piece of graph paper and asked to graph a data set. They asked about interval, labels for the x-axis, & labels for y-axis. The students worked in pairs. Some groups labeled the graph the x-axis and the y-axis. Other groups just plotted the points and connected them. Some graphs moved up and down radically showing the variety of the scores. Other graphs were quite flat—this all depended upon the interval used. One graph needed to be read from right to left. All graphs represented the data the groups were given. One pair arranged the data from the smallest to largest before they graphed it, but didn’t match their point accurately with the x-axis labels.
We did the Sorting Graphs activity from the Opening Unit. I did this with my Pre-GEDII (Levels 4 & 5) and ABE (Levels 1, 2 & 3). The Pre-GED class was divided into three groups. Each group divided the graphs into groups of bar, line, and circle graphs. I told them great and now I want you to separate them into different categories. Their second grouping was then by general topics of the graphs their titles were very similar.
My ABE group separated theirs into line, circle, and bar graphs, but did not know the correct terminology. They worked well together to title their categories with what they saw. They titled line graphs with “ZigZags”. Bar graphs were divided into “ups & downs” and “sideways graphs”. They did label the circle graphs with “circle graphs”. When I listened to their discussion they came up with ZigZag when they looked at the graph “President Bush’s Approval Rating” because it looked like ZigZag patterns in clothing. Their discussion of bar graphs was about how the “lines” went sideways and ups & downs. They ask me if they did okay. I liked their terminology so well that I didn’t want them to change their categories. I wanted their “verbage” to remain on their poster. They were very proud of their poster when I put the two groups together to compare their posters and made a big deal of their creativity.