High leverage teaching moves meet the PPA.

This week two questions I had seemed to answer themselves.  The first was how to apply Seattle school district’s High Leverage Teaching Move number 3: Use of vocabulary.  The second was how to apply PPA 1E; when being observed during a lesson a candidate wants to be sure their lesson plan’s “learning targets are grounded in transformative multicultural knowledge, reasoning, performance skills, products, or dispositions.”  How do we accomplish this in math classes?  Trying to implement the Seattle School District call to provide students content and process terms daily is one way this PPA can be satisfied.  It is really important that in math vocabulary is used correctly.  For example slope is slope and teachers need to be sure their students are familiar with and fluent with this term.  This is not going to be as easy for someone whose native tongue is not English.  While English speaking students can to a certain degree intuit what slope is in graphic representations, non English speakers will find it difficult.   We need to make sure we take steps to make words like these clear to non English speakers.  This is a high leverage teaching move that begins to satisfy PPA 1E.