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Teaching for Social Justice with Probability and Statistics Lesson Analysis

Teaching Statistics with Social Justice (TSSJ) in mind represents, to me, teaching students to be aware of the world around them and to recognize the effect it has on their lives. For that matter, learning to read and interpret statistics will allow students to understand what is happening in the world, especially if we teach them to go to the sources of the data and not just to read the visualizations that the media publish, which can be, unfortunately most of the time, biased towards the message the publisher wants to convey. Then “TSSJ would also include students developing a sense of empowerment to be able to use statistics to “talk back” to or change the world” (Lesser 2005)

The Learning for Justice classroom resources, including the lesson plans are a perfect way to introduce students to the kind of analysis they need to understand how data that governs the world is constructed and utilized, for good or for bad. As their website describes: “These robust, ready-to-use classroom lessons offer breadth and depth, spanning essential social justice topics and reinforcing critical social emotional learning skills” Learning for Justice.

Out of the lessons I analyzed, the one that impacted me the most was “Analyzing Health Disparities”. This is a lesson for middle and upper grade levels, 6-12. There are three stages: collecting, analyzing causes, and designing a solution. Each stage has its unique handout. Pros: Interesting topic, the lesson flow is easy to follow. Can be taught in collaboration with an English class if the school allows inter-disciplinary teaching. Cons: the lesson must be modified or upgraded to incorporate more Statistics concepts which need to be done in the first stage. This can be resolved by tailoring the lesson to our state standards, curriculum, and grade level.

In this lesson, students need to assess a topic, consider causes, and design solutions. I like that students collect data through a survey. The data collected is qualitative in nature but is then summarized with numerical values which turns it into quantitative data that can be used to create displays/visualizations.

If I were to implement this type of lesson, I would first have a brainstorm of ideas and questions that could be used to determine Health Disparities, as opposed to the questions being “given” to the students. This way, they can formulate their own questions and create the survey accordingly. Maybe the current survey question can be a baseline to the student-created one. Students fill in the survey individually and calculate their score, then, they predict the mean score for the class. When the actual set of data is collected and the mean calculated, they discuss if their predictions are far from the actual mean (variability).

I would improve this lesson from the mathematics/statistics point of view to serve the purposes of Statistics academic content. To do so, more data might need to be collected, which can be done through giving the survey to more students in the school in order to increase the sample population. I could also ask the students to take the survey to 10 people each, either from the school or from outside the school. This approach will help introduce the idea that the larger sample will give a more accurate measure of center and spread.

The last two purposes of the lesson, analyzing the causes of health disparity and designing solutions, are enormously valuable but might be out of the scope of the Statistics lesson. The second handout’s goal is to determine which of the several factors that contribute to health disparities are related to each health inequality problem.

Finally, designing a solution task could be done in collaboration with another subject. The goal of the last task is “to propose one possible solution, idea, or program (locally or statewide) that could help to make a positive impact on the health disparity you’ve identified through research” Teaching Tolerance handout. Since the goal is persuasive writing, it could hopefully be tackled in collaboration with the English department.

References

Learning for Justice. Analyzing Health Disparities. Lesson. A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center (1991-2021)

Retrieved February 2021 from: https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/lessons/analyzing-health-disparities

Lesser, Lawrence M. (2007) Critical Values and Transforming Data: Teaching Statistics with Social Justice. Journal of Statistics Education 15(1) University of Texas at El Paso. http://jse.amstat.org/v15n1/lesser.html

Geometry is an embedded area of Mathematics that study the visual ideas and shapes that can be drawn from nature or from the human mind and the relationships we can find among them and among its parts. Informally, relationships can be found by experimenting with the ideas and shapes. Then, formally, we can add properties, measurements, and algebraic reasoning to describe the relationships precisely.

Consistent with the constructionist theory of learning and the Inquiry Teaching and Learning application of constructivism, Geometry teaching and learning should always start with engaging students in questioning and exploring concepts first, before giving any kind of nomenclature and definitions.

Consider Piaget's framework and Van Hiele's Levels of Geometric Thinking when you prepare your lessons. Click on the button below to learn more.

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