Secondary General Education Case Study

Secondary General Education Case Study

I teach Algebra I in a high school in a small district where the student demographics are 76% Hispanic, 18% Anglo, 5% African-American and 4% Asian. The majority of the students (85%) are on free and reduced lunch, so they are coming from a low socioeconomic background. The students that I teach are freshman and it is their first time taking Algebra and at least half of the class are flunking. I am trying to come up with a way to improve my student's grades and help them become successful in Algebra and in life.

The student that I will use as an example is Juan. Juan is 14 years old and has two older siblings and four younger siblings. His oldest brother has dropped out of school and is doing odd jobs to make money. His older sister is a junior in high school but feels really overwhelmed and has talked about dropping out of school. Juan desperately wants to graduate from high school and possibly be the first in his family to get a high school diploma, but he is really struggling with Algebra and is one or two points away from flunking. Juan likes to read but is reading at a 2nd or 3rd level, but he enjoys reading stories to his younger siblings and is getting more confidence in his reading. His favorite class is art and he is quite good at drawing and design.

Based on the above information, the family of models or theorist that I would primarily draw on for help would be Maslow and Piaget. They both seem to understand the students minds pretty well and have established core theories that meet the criteria for helping Juan and his peers develop positive self-concepts. (Ferguson, p. 7) According to Piaget, children (students) learn in stages and the best way for a student to learn is in overlapping stages. (MacLeod)

According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, probably this class could use some basic self-esteem builders to build up their confidence in themselves, which will lay the groundwork to learn the basic math skills they will need in order to be able to understand and grasp the basic concepts of Algebra I. (MacLeod)

In order for this class to learn Algebra concepts, they would need to have a basic understanding of the algebraic and other mathematical terms -- I would recommend a word wall or a word of the day or word of the week, where the focus is on a particular word and its meaning. Since the majority of the class is Hispanic, I would have one student a week do the word of the week and he/she would write the word in both Spanish and English on the word card. They would also write a sentence every day using the word or since Juan and some of his classmates are artistic, use some form of artwork to describe the word. They could even use the calligraphy type of printing that is sometimes used in graffiti, but just not use it as a gang sign or symbol.

Another way to help the students learn Algebra is to show them real-world problems where they can see what the purposes are for learning Algebra and how they would use Algebra. One of the ways to do this would be bring in parents or other adults that use Algebra in their day-to-day careers or jobs. They could explain why they used Algebra and how they used Algebra.

A learning objective for this subject would be "the student will use mean, median, mode and range in a set of ten problems and get seven to eight of the problems correct." The student will be able to explain or demonstrate how they arrived at their answers. They may use calculators, but still must show the steps used to find the answers.

One example that could be used in the classroom is to have each student take their pulse rate and write it down. After the entire class has listed the pulse rate of the each student in the classroom, they would list them from least to greatest and then put them in order. After they have the list, they will find the mean, median, mode and range of pulse rates. Since they are using themselves as subjects, it will keep their attention and focus more than writing down numbers from a random list in a textbook.