Clip 17/17: Rate of Change: Post-Lesson Debrief Part C

Overview

In the final part of their post-lesson debrief conversation, Antoinette Villarin and Cecilio Dimas focus on the academic language students used and how Antoinette was able to maintain the productive, content-focused conversation throughout the lesson. Antoinette and Cecilio connect this work to the TRU Math (Teaching for Robust Understanding of Mathematics) framework, [The Five Dimensions of Powerful Classrooms](http://map.mathshell.org/trumath.php), as an effective means to build students’ agency, authority, and identity as mathematicians.

Antoinette and Cecilio focus on one student who had only joined Antoinette classroom five days prior to the recorded lesson, and how the partner sharing and the focus on explicit structures for academic language supported this student in making an effective entry to the classroom community of learning.

Antoinette and Cecilio close their reflective and collegial conversation by anticipating ways of engaging the students the following day and continuing to deepen student understanding of representations of constant rate of change, navigating between divergent and convergent thinking.

Teacher Commentary

Cecilio and I looked at what students were doing on problem number three and then what they wrote on the table on the assessment. It really helped to see which kids were better at doing it correctly and actually addressing rate of change and which ones weren't. My learning goal for them was how to connect the rate of change to what they were seeing graphically. We definitely used the pre-assessment to help with creating that goal.

Also, with pairing my students like we did on this day, I change seats quite a bit. We change seats at least every month and I did the seat change a couple of weeks before we did the filming. I was strategic about who I was going to pair students with, especially in that class. Rather than have high-performing student paired with a low-performing student, I paired them together so that the gap between each pair was not too large. I felt that both students could grow together from the same strategic points in the lesson.