Thinking about geometry and my tumultuous relationship with it these past few weeks has made me come to realize how much I have grown to love the subject and the added challenge it seems to come with when teaching it to high school students who over the years have heard from upperclassmen that ‘proofs suck’ and ‘geometry is awful’. And while some topics are still a struggle for me to get across to my students, I love the challenge of finding new activities to bring to them to help them appreciate it like I do. One activity I love is at the beginning of our quadrilaterals unit I always have my students begin by creating two columns split 3 times to create 8 boxes on their paper. Then I tell them to fill one box with the name of one quadrilateral that they know. Then they pass their notebook to the next student in their group and they need to come up with a different quadrilateral in the next box, then they pass again, and so on. When it dawns on them that they need to come up with 8 unique quadrilaterals the look of dread sets in, they can only think of a square, or question if a diamond is an acceptable shape. Typically the last 3 turns are torture for them and I get a good little laugh. We then share out and they realize they knew a lot more than they thought and typically we get all 8 (the kite being the real struggle, because ‘how is that a shape when diamond isn’t!?’) I share this story because this week, while working on my Introduction to Trigonometry unit, I was challenged to come up with new pedagogies to bring to this unit by doing a quickfire challenge in my CEP 805 course. I had to set a 15 minute timer, add a pedagogy with a quick description, and then add another, and another until the timer ran out. I felt the torture, much as I’m sure my students do, as the minutes pressed on and I had used all of my go to strategies and was now diving into the uncomfortable unknown. However, I then was able to give and receive feedback from my classmates about my ideas and my confidence grew. I was reminded that trying something new in class, while scary, is usually rewarding. Even if it fails there is a lesson there for your students to see - even as teachers we are not perfect, but we are still trying. Two new strategies I intend to implement in my trigonometry unit that are new to me, in this context, are a Gallery Walk and 3-Act-Math. In my gallery walk I intend to have students visit 12 different stations with 3 of each having a different piece of a right triangle being solved for. Each different missing piece will be color coded and there will be matching color post-it notes at each station. Students will copy the picture and steps for solving onto the post-it, hang on to it and at the end look for the pattern in how each problem is being solved. Hopefully they will see that whenever solving for the adjacent side when given the hypotenuse, for example, you use cosine and follow the same steps. The downside being, they are not actually solving. I have done a 3-Act-Math with my students before in Algebra, so I am excited to bring this to my geometry students as it always goes over really well. Dan Meyer, who pioneered the idea of 3-Act-Math describes how this works in the video below. As students work together, they come to a consensus of ‘how it will end’ and you share the final act that shows them ‘the solution’ or the ending of the video. Students are so invested in figuring it out and knowing how it will end that they are eager to get more information to work through and figure it out. However some students can get frustrated with 'not knowing' or the unstructured style of the lesson. Overall, I’m glad this week reminded me that while challenging my students is good, challenging myself to try something new is also good- and can help my students in the long run as well. Resources:
Tedx Talks. (2010, April 13). Dan Meyer at TEDxNYED [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/BlvKWEvKSi8
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMarissa McGregor, high school math teacher extraordinaire. I love my husband, daughter, and family dearly. Archives
August 2022
CategoriesThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |