Initial Codes

As an assignment for my class I was to come up with a set of codes, focused on standards and a specific content strand, to use in analyzing what is present in the text I use to teach mathematics to my students.

I chose the concept of data analysis to study. At first, I had no clue where to begin. Thinking that I needed to come up with concepts within Data Analysis presented to students I knew I wanted my general realms to be collection, organization, representation and interpretation because these are processes in which students interact with the concept. I searched Investigations, my math text, on the web for support and came upon this website: Investigations - Curriculum by Math Content. Perfect! So I proceeded to examine how data analysis is developed throughout the K-5 curriculum and thought I had found a great starting point. Wrong.

I shared my findings with my professor and he helped enlighten me that building my code for my text based on the sequencing of my text would be pointless; the ideas I would generate would certainly be present, given I am using the text to develop a format to understand the text better. In his words,

"Remember that the coding should be

curriculum-independent. It should be about the math content, not the text that you use. :) That's why I think Common Core, NCTM, and NV State are logical starting points."

So, I took his advice and turned to the standards for support. I organized the standards by source (NCTM Standards, Common Core State Standards, NV State Standards) into a table that could help me see the development of data analysis K-5. This proved to be a more useful starting point.

After analyzing the table, I pulled information to fit the realms I had decided on, since these processes appeared present in the standards. At the end, my messy paper looked like this:

I typed up my findings into a clean document. This was good enough for me as a solid standards-based and curriculum-independent starting point.

My current set of codes has already changed from my original set, with the consultation of another professor who committed to a similar task for his dissertation. The current document can be found here.

As we move forward with using our codes to analyze our texts, I am certain more clarity will come to me on how to adapt my system to more adequately fit the curriculum. There was frustration developing the initial codes and I anticipate more frustration as the process continues; this is probably because I'm putting a lot of thought into it. I had to consider a number of aspects such as standards, curriculum and specificity such as what should be included and to what degree.

What I've learned from this process is that it won't be perfect the first time and I'll just have to be content for now until I find something that makes me reconsider a prior decision. I look forward to re-labeling the codes and committing to descriptors that I feel are suitable and satisfying. I know the objective of the assignment is to really look at how a topic is developed in a curriculum, how that aligns with the expectations of standards, reflect on the findings and build awareness of the parallels, gaps and design, and inform my teaching.