Student name: Quinn Freeby

In the News
Complete APA citation of the resource:
Skarin, Ranae. (2019, September 9). Improving math curriculum for English language learners.
Edutopia. Reterived from https://www.edutopia.org/article/improving-math-curriculum-enlgish-
language-learners.
Two – three sentence summary of the issue/topic/idea:
This article talks about improving mathematics for English Language Learners and how to create
a better and more effective curriculum within your own school. Looking at a New York school,
the English Language Learners had improved in all subject areas except math and these scores
stayed stagnant. With this in mind Rachel decided to get a team together of math teachers and
ELD teachers together in order to better evaluate student’s needs. This process helps make sense
both the teacher practices and students learning, understating their strengths and needs which
then leads to what curricula is needed. After this the team studied the instructional side of the
materials, were the math materials rich, intellectually demanding, proving opportunity for real
world applications, and if the material give students opportunities to learn through scaffolding. In
the end the team can guide the team, this helps to create high quality materials, including
formative assessments that show the rage of ELLs content and language knowledge. In the end,
it is important to implement these changes and giving students opportunities to apply
mathematics to real word purposes, making the language objectives help students develop
mathematics knowledge in words, phrases, and syntax.
Connection to ELLs:
In relationship to ELL students, they make up 1/3 of the school community and their learning
potential is exponential however, the math scores of the students seemed to not be changing. In
the article it talks about how ELLs in math classes scripted curriculum was not enough, so
teachers supplemented on their own. But this causes a lack of cohesion and there is little to no
improvement on math for ELLs. This collaborative group ultimately it to help improve the math
curriculum so that ELL students are better served through scaffolding and changing the way that
materials are presented and concepts. ELLs in math classes often do not have ample
opportunities for listening, reading, writing, or speaking. Therefore, when applying the
mathematical language can be quite challenging and hard to contextualize. As the teacher, we
must build off of students backgrounds and their lives to create better material in mathematics.
Questions:
Do you think that incorporating real-world scenarios into mathematics matters when teaching
ELLs?
What experience have you had with teaching ELLs mathematics? Did you see scaffolding?
https://www.edutopia.org/article/improving-math-curriculum-english-language-learners