Enhancing Numeracy through Career/Technical Classrooms

6 Day Workshop

Dec. 1 & 2, 2011

Jan. 12 & 13, 2012

Mar. 22 & 23, 2012

Instructor:

Sign-In: 8:00 pm
Session: 8:30 - 3:00 pm
Lunch Provided
Cost: $150.00*		 Location:
CVES Instructional Services Center
14 Area Development Dr., Suite 100
Plattsburgh, NY 12901

Workshop Description:

Target Audience: Career/Technical and Mathematics Instructors

The Numeracy workshop is a scaffolded series of 3 two-day workshops. Each session builds on the previous session.

You are invited to participate in a professional development opportunity to strengthen your students’ mathematics understanding. BOCES teachers, partnered with component school mathematics teachers, will design and develop authentic career/technical projects which fully integrate rigorous mathematics while also enhancing mathematics skill development in the mathematics classroom through creating contextual problems. Participating teams will produce a unit(s) of study to share across the learning community while also being supported to model the process to other career/technical and mathematics teacher teams.

Enhancing Numeracy through Career/Technical Classrooms:
This exciting partnership opportunity includes a series of professional development workshops aimed at bringing BOCES and component school professionals together to address challenges related to student mathematics achievement. Consider joining the collaboration to address several goals.
The goals of this initiative include:

  1. Share mathematics and career/technical content and course goals to better understand and identify partnering opportunities;
  2. Work through an instructional design that enhances the mathematics related to career/technical projects and assignments;
  3. Collaborate to assess students’ mathematics awareness and achievement as it relates to CTE lessons;
  4. Create contextual problems that can be used by component school teachers to enhance lessons and projects addressing algebra, geometry, statistics and more!  
  5. Develop activities and assignments that require students to work through mathematics examples embedded in the CTE curriculum, planned projects and assignments;
  6. Organize a learning community of component school and BOCES teachers to plan integrated lessons, give each other support and feedback, and collect data on student achievement.

Who should be involved?  

  1. BOCES instructors from career/technical fields including but not limited to automotive technology, construction trades, pre-engineering, manufacturing trades, agriculture, health and medical science, and business and marketing studies are encouraged to attend. 
  2. Component school mathematics colleagues who are interested in leveraging real-world scenarios for learning. 

The Process: An Overview of the Eight Steps for Developing an Authentic Anchor Project Unit

  1. Identify and describe a major authentic project, rich with embedded mathematics content, which career/technical faculty will have students complete during a semester. 
  2. Identify the embedded mathematics and technical standard(s) and use of technological tools that can be taught through the integrated units. This will involve taking the mathematics standards and being deliberate about identifying the specific knowledge and skills students are expected to apply and understand.
  3. Identify the literacy skills, study skills and habits of success that students will be expected to apply in advancing their mastery of academic and technical content and skills. This will involve identifying materials to be read, records to be kept, reports to be written, quality of work expected, behavior expectations for individuals and for teams, and indicators of other key habits of success important to the 21st century workplace, etc.
  4. Develop a summative assessment that incorporates mathematics and technical content questions and the use of technology questions at the end of the unit. Indicate the benchmark that demonstrates mastery at the proficient level. Describe the re-teach strategies for those students who fail to demonstrate mastery.
  5. Develop a process to pre-assess students’ knowledge and skills pertaining to mathematics, technical content, technology, and tools embedded in the unit. Determine how students will be pre-assessed in each of these four domains—mathematics, technical content, use of technology, and other skills and habits essential to success. Identify techniques—such as questioning, observations, group learning activity, vocabulary measures, etc.—for assessing students’ understandings and skills in these areas
  6. Develop how CT faculty will engage students with mathematics and technical content and the use of technology and tools embedded in the Authentic Anchor Project Unit. This will involve identifying 1) a series of teacher-directed instructional activities; 2) student assignments aimed at helping students understand the mathematics and technical content; and 3) ways technology will be used to enhance learning. Consider how to bridge the gap between the pathway’s language as it relates to mathematical operations and formal mathematical language so that students can understand and use workplace vocabulary, formal mathematics language and their connections.
  7. Develop how mathematics faculty will engage students with mathematics and technical content and the use of technology and tools embedded in the Authentic Anchor Project Unit. Develop related contextual mathematics assignments using the unit’s embedded mathematics concept. This will involve having students work through mathematic problems and assignments that are similar to those embedded in the CT project. It also involves using examples of increasing levels of difficulty:  basic to proficient to advanced. This work will continue to bridge the language between academic and the language of the CT pathway. Describe how teachers will check for understanding and determine which concepts can be team taught by the mathematics and CT teachers.
  8. Describe how students will demonstrate their understanding of mathematics and technical knowledge and skills by completing the project as well as assignments designed to provide additional practice. 

To Register: Please mail your Registration Form to the CVES Instructional Services Center
at the above address or FAX it to: 518-561-0240

*Cost for districts not participating in the School Improvement CoSer 506 is estimated at $225.00.
Lunch provided. All estimated costs are based on 20 participants. Costs will be adjusted once registration is closed.