Rachel Folger laughs when she recounts the time one of the students in her eighth grade social studies class exclaimed, “Whoa, Ms. Folger! Did you know that this is just what we’re doing in math?” Rachel is thrilled that her students—who typically “walk through their day in these very isolated subject areas”—are making connections across the curriculum. As part of our Contextualizing Data Education via Project-Based Learning (DataPBL for short) project, she is integrating datasets into a module on the Japanese American internment and having her students use CODAP to explore the data with tables, maps, and graphs. And, yes, she knows that her students are also analyzing graphs in their math class.
The Concord Consortium (2023). Teacher innovator interview: Rachel Folger. @Concord, 27(1), 15.