Clip 15/15: Modeling with Polynomials Post-Lesson Debrief - Part 3

In closing their lesson debrief, Deidre Grevious asks Amy Burke to make explicit the elements Amy introduces into the lesson to support students in reasoning. Amy describes her use of sentence frames and turn-and-talks as supportive approaches for building understanding of Standard for Mathematical Practice (SMP) 3 (“Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others”), as well as requiring the students to write about their thinking.  

Regarding struggles the students encountered during the lesson, Amy comments that she would need to dig more deeply into the students’ work to identify which students used the quadratic versus the cubic function. Deidre and Amy examine the work samples, and Amy says she expected that all groups would use the cubic function, and shares that she didn’t anticipate that the students would have an error in their calculation, producing an outlier value that may have led some groups to choose the quadratic to model the data.  

Amy observes that in a future lesson, it might be helpful to show the work of a group that had used a cubic approach to model the data, once they had corrected the data error. Amy reflects on how she might have done the lesson differently, whether having that student share the correction earlier might have supported other students, though she underscores that students still worked deeply with multiple representations of mathematics, and engaged in deep thinking on building and revising an argument, which they were able to do despite the data errors and associated challenges.