All posts by Eric Appleton

About Eric Appleton

Eric Appleton is a math and science professional developer for the City University of New York (CUNY) Adult Literacy/HSE Program. Before coming to CUNY, he taught in an education program for formerly incarcerated people. Eric is a founding member of the Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI), which meets monthly to do math and talk about teaching. In 2018, he became president-elect of the Adult Numeracy Network (ANN).

Slow Reveal Graphs Collection

A slow reveal graph is a teaching tool that starts with a numberless graph (or map, diagram, etc.) without labels. As the class notices and wonders about the graph, the teacher slowly reveals the original text and numbers until the class is looking at the complete original graph. The process allows students and teachers to focus on specific parts of the graph and do a close reading and analysis. For more information about slow reveal graphs, please visit Slow Reveal Graphs | CollectEdNY. For more graphs you can use in the classroom, please visit the CUNY data, graphs and maps collection.

New graphs are added to the collection weekly! –> Download

This collection of slow reveal graphs was originally created by Tim Berrigan, a NYSED Teacher Leader from the Brooklyn Public Library, to respond to the fact that mathematical reasoning is required on the Social Studies and Science sections of the GED. While working with slow reveal graphs, students practice the following skills: fact vs. opinion, evidence and conclusions, using data to make predictions, dependent and independent variables, correlation and causation, mean, median, mode, and range in statistics.

Continue reading Slow Reveal Graphs Collection

Science Lesson Plans Organized by HSE Standards

The Minnesota Literacy Council (MLC) has created a large set of science lesson plans on the content assessed by the GED exam. The MLC science lesson plans cover the same three subdomains tested in Earth & Space Science, Life Science and Physical Science. Continue reading Science Lesson Plans Organized by HSE Standards

Teaching about the Election

If you’re like me, you’re compulsively reading news about the candidates for president, thinking about the state of our democracy and anxiously waiting for Election Day. Recent news has probably come up in discussion among your students as well. This is a great opportunity to connect your curriculum with the issues at play in this election, but it’s important to have appropriate materials and advice for handling these discussions.

Luckily, the New England Literacy Resource Center (NELRC) has put out a great collection of resources on teaching the election in adult literacy, HSE and ESOL. Continue reading Teaching about the Election

Supporting 1st Generation College Students

We work hard to help our students build their academic skills and develop the content knowledge they need to earn their HSE diplomas, but there are many other factors that can make or break our students as they attempt to successfully cross the divide into college coursework and degrees. For graduating high school seniors who are the first in their families to go to college, being successful in college can be extremely difficult because of academic, social and financial pressures. For adult students, after they struggle to get their high school equivalency diploma, a college degree can seem impossible. It is important that they see people like themselves struggle and pick themselves up as they work through college. Our students need to see resilience at work and prepare themselves for some of the same challenges. Continue reading Supporting 1st Generation College Students

CUNY Webinar: Exploring the Science Item Specifications

In June of 2016, DRC CTB released item specifications documents for each of the five tests on the TASC exam. The documents define the content and format of the test for item writers, but they also give teachers more specific information about what is being tested than we have had before. In a July 11th webinar hosted by the CUNY Adult Literacy/HSE Program, panelists discussed a standard in life science in order to explore how the item specifications work. Goals of the webinar included increasing understanding of the item specifications documents and, specifically, the content standard on cellular division and differentiation (p. 51), while exploring ideas on teaching these science topics. Continue reading CUNY Webinar: Exploring the Science Item Specifications