Lesson
9th Grade Math – Using Functions
Clip 18/18: Debrief Part 5
Overview Download Transcript (PDF)
Reflecting back more generally on developing students’ mathematical understandings of functions, they were able to begin to see “the math behind the race” – the distance in meters of the race as a whole, the length of the pool, and who gets to the end first. She evaluates how well students could look at a graph and discuss the units of a graph, what details are contained in the graph, what questions the graph can answer, and what stories the independent and dependent variables are telling. She considers how she might go about the lesson differently: spending more time on the three-read, making explicit how different posters conveyed information. Lisa reflects on Smith and Stein’s Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions and how the practices support her in effective mathematics teaching and advancing students toward the day’s goal.
Teacher Commentary
Teacher Commentary
Lisa Hennefarth
This is the first time that these students had ever seen a graph where there were multiple things going on, and the big question was, “Are they going to be able to read the graph and be able to pick out what's going on, based on the fact that they've only seen single lines on a graph?”
Then, the question about the commentary was about getting the students to realize how you start a commentary. Or just being able to express in writing this kind of excitement.
Even with the “Which One Doesn’t Belong?,” if you had seen this at the beginning of the year, you would not have seen this level of writing. We had gone through the entire semester one, and we were one month into semester two -- so they shifted from the vague “A does not belong, because it does not have a constant rate of change” to just having this whole language embellished and much more pronounced at this time of the year. By the end of the year, I'm looking for them to be able to say, “A doesn't belong,” and why A doesn't belong, because now we can use some mathematical language based on sentence frames from the beginning of the year. It builds over time.