“ We ’ ve fit it into the curriculum in a really cool and important way ,” Wittig says . He and Picklo have blended Pfenning ’ s 10 lessons into Wittig ’ s efforts to incorporate American history into current events .
The partnership is a win-win , enriching the material Picklo and Wittig are presenting to their students and offering Pfenning a chance to see how the lessons are received and to make necessary adjustments to strengthen them . As Picklo advances to the next slide , she ’ s seated at a desk near the back of the room , listening and taking notes .
“ Normally I don ’ t have this luxury ,” Pfenning says . After completing the curricula , she shares the materials with her colleagues at KIPP and Brown and ultimately travels to New York to help train teachers . Then , several months later , she visits again to sit in on a class and observe how students are responding .
Braiding Data and Content
Pfenning ’ s work with KIPP aims to provide students with a firm grounding in statistical literacy by integrating data and statistics smoothly and meaningfully into lesson plans . The idea is to use data and their representations to support the content of a lesson rather than serving as the content itself .
Each of the unit ’ s lessons demonstrates how data can be interwoven seamlessly into a compelling story . The visualizations of data that Pfenning has used range from simple pie charts to more complicated scatter plots , and she ’ s also included many primary source documents , such as a table showing the salaries of colonial schoolteachers .
The representations of data that Pfenning selects amplify her points , underscoring important pieces of information in ways that text cannot . There ’ s an art to selecting the right data to represent as well as choosing the proper way to present them .
Working with Wittig at the start of the term helped Pfenning to refine the ways that data complement and support the information contained in these lessons .
“ Greg ’ s had some great ideas ,” she says . “ He wanted to include examples of charts that are not appropriate for a given data set and have students tell us why .”
Wittig used what he knew of his students to offer that adjustment .
“ We suggested that instead of just giving the right answer , we give all the possible wrong answers and why they ’ re wrong ,” Wittig says . “ It ’ s a way of discriminating between different ways of expressing information and finding which would be the best .”
The idea is to get students thinking more explicitly about why one method of presenting some data , such as a histogram , might present a clearer picture than a pie chart , for example .
“ I did that and saw that students were picking up on what might be lost when you have either too much or too little information ,” Pfenning says .
Nancy Pfenning
Using data in this way — much the same way that a historian might use it — makes the lessons more powerful , Wittig says . “ Any time you can teach a skill in the context of how it will be used , it ’ s always more effective .”
Scaffolding for Teachers
Having Pfenning ’ s lessons to follow and build upon has been helpful to Picklo , who earned his Master of Arts in Teaching degree at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education in spring 2024 .
“ It allowed some room to try out different discussions and different questions to ask ,” he says . “ Each section we taught the lesson to engaged [ with it ] in a different way .”
Teaching the gerrymandering lesson to different sections , for example , Picklo was able to try a few different ways of engaging students . In one class , students used rolls of crepe paper to divide the class into sections , just as gerrymandering cordons off geographical areas into voting districts . Another section instead drew districts on the board .
“ You have to read the classroom and see how students are interacting with the material ,” Picklo says , in order to determine how best to implement a lesson . “ There ’ s room for trying out different things while keeping the same structure .”
In addition to the slides that Picklo presented to the class , Pfenning has created supplementary teaching resources , such as a workbook that students are following along in to answer the questions that pop up every few slides .
To bolster their understanding , students created posters around topics ranging from gerrymandering and the Electoral College to the role that race and gender have played in voting over the course of across American history .
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