Lesson Portfolio Entry: Utilizing Social Justice Issues What tools or resources will students have to use in their

work that will give them entry to, and help them reason through, the activity? What is the main activity that students will be working on in this lesson?

Instructional Support

Task

Students will interpret tabular data to calculate each continents (or subdivision thereof) percentage of population and wealth as compared to the world. Then, students will generate average wealth ratios (or wealth per person) and compare between different continents. Afterward, students will draw on knowledge across content areas to discuss the cause of such unequal distribution making explicit link to how the mathematics illuminated the inequality.
What are the various ways that students might complete the activity?

Students will be given tables to organize their calculations of percentages. After completing the tables, cookies will be passed out to aid in finding the average wealth per person in each continent (based on the amount of cookie received). The cookies will continually serve as a manipulative for contextualizing the average wealth per person in each continent.

What understandings will students take away from this activity?

Learning Goals (Residue)

What questions might you ask students that will support their exploration of the activity and bridge between what they did and what you want them to learn (the two green boxes)? To be clear on what students actually did, begin by asking a set of assessing questions such as: What did you do? How did you get that? What does this mean? Once you have a clearer sense of what the student understands, move on to appropriate set of questions below.

Students will use proportional reasoning to determine the fractions of their class and wealth distribution for their class. Students will verbally describe similarities and differences between proportions and ratios. Students will compare and contrast wealth across continents to determine whether the distribution is fair and whether it should be.

Student will employ a variety of solution methods. Students will set up proportions in order to find the initial percentages. Students will take the population per continent and divide by the total population of the world. Then, multiply the quotient by 100. Students will calculate the ratios in two ways: wealth per person to wealth per person OR cookies per person to cookies per person. Ultimately, the students conclusions cannot be predetermined.

How do you know this process gives you the right percentage? How is the proportion method related to the dividing method? Can you have part of a person/cookie? How do we account for that mathematically? What kind of distribution do the percentages suggest? How did the distribution become unequal? Why is Oceania/Australia slightly misleading? How is the size of the numbers important to our calculations? How does the ratio of the cookies compare to the wealth per person of each country? What is the cause of the difference?

What will students say, do, produce, etc. that will provide evidence of their understandings?

Evidence

Students will explain a proportion represents an equality of two ratios (or similarity). Students will produce the number of cookies each student receives on the continent. Students will calculate a ratio comparing U.S. to Africa of 28 or 17.9. Students will write how the ratios connected to the wealth distribution inequality.