I wish I had taken a picture of whiteboards in my period 7/8 class. I challenged them to write point-slope from two points and also give slope-intercept form. I wouldn't tell them if they were right (which they hated), but they spent a good 15 minutes discussing strategy. There were some great moments, like when one group thought they had found the y-intercept and graphed the equations to find they had parallel lines. "Oh, that means our y-intercept is wrong," one of them commented. Back to the drawing board they went. The discussions were so rich that I didn't cut them off until the very last minute to get things wrapped up at the end of class, but I made time to point out the SOMP I'd witnessed: "Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them," "Look for and make use of structure," "Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others," etc. We didn't discuss the right answer. I'm not sure if that was a brilliant idea or evidence of poor timing. I like the idea that they left my room having had a rich discussion and no one left with the idea that they did all that work just to be wrong. I don't like that there wasn't a clear conclusion to the problem I'd posed. We'll follow up with more examples on Tuesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment