Clip 5/24: Proportions Planning Part E

HILLARY LEWIS-WOLFSEN: Because we had done this lesson a few times before with other groups of students, we had anticipated what kinds of errors we might see. It was very similar, so that worked out well. The first time, we didn’t have that, so we based our whole lesson on the exact errors and interesting answers we got the first time around. Each of the classes have had very similar “interesting answers.” We started off reading through all the assessments, making notes of the interesting answers and categorizing them: What was the answer? If it was wrong, how was it wrong? If it was right, was there a diagram that went with it? What made it interesting? We tallied a lot of these to see what was common. Even some of the interesting things that weren’t common were valuable enough that we might still include it. I’m sure there were some that we wouldn’t have used. There was a time consideration. We needed to “tell the story” of the problem: How do we want the kids to think about it, what do we want them to get out of the problem? If an interesting answer doesn’t help, then we don’t use it.