Clip 6/18: Lesson Part 1C
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Continuing the lesson, Lisa Hennefarth shares with her students that they are going to take the information from the beginning “which one doesn’t belong” math talk and move toward the next task. During this “launch phase,” she asks them, “Who has seen a race? How many students have seen a race?” Some students respond that they’ve seen a car race, or motocross, or a video game pod race, or track and field. She asks, “What makes a race exciting?” One student, whose father races cars, says “whether the team wins.” Lisa plays a video of an Olympics swim race and asks the students to listen to the announcer describing the meet, which ended in a thrilling last-minute victory for the USA.
Teacher Commentary
Teacher Commentary
Lisa Hennefarth
When I select a cognitively challenging task, obviously I want to challenge their thinking, but it has to be in such a way that it’s going to build on what they've already learned as well as stretch them to think forward. In this particular situation, we were in the throws of unit functions. We had started the year off with univariate data. We had gone in and done solving equations and then unit three was bivariate data, in which they had a chance to do “line of best fit.” So now all of a sudden I'm looking at this task: okay, they've seen a graph, they know how to read a graph, they're going to notice in this graph that this graph isn't necessarily linear, meaning it's not going to be straight. Are they going to struggle with “that line is going on top of that, what does that mean?” Are they going to be concerned about finding the speed or the slope? That was something I had decided early on, that I was not going to do it, or require them to measure speed, because we hadn't talked about speed in class. We hadn't talked about that kind of element. So it was really to understand what are the most important pieces of this graph.