Willink Week 5

There were some great highlights this week, and one minor lowlight.

First the highlights. I put together a group activity for the accelerated class, which was a minor risk since there are 36 students in the class. We are deep into the unit on linear relationships, and a number of the standards are different variations of converting a data table to a graph, an equation to a graph, a slope and an intercept to an equation, and so forth. Andy has a tool he calls a "function frame" - I haven't heard the terminology before but it incorporates all the elements on one page.

I modified the function frame slightly, created 40 different linear equations, printed them as blanks on colored cardstock, filled out one of the 5 representations, cut them up, and turned it into a project! Each of 8 groups of 4-5 students had 5 different equations, each with one of the 5 types of representations. They had to fill out the other 4 representations, for a total of 25 cards (5 equations x 5 representations). They were really into this, and especially when they got to the next step of trading their shuffled decks with another group, and competing to see who could sort them out into the correct 5 equations.

The two images attached to this post are the original function frame and then an example of a completed set of 5 representations. The sheet was cut on the dark lines, and of course was blank in 4 of the 5 areas. The image here is the answer key for one of the equations - before trading I had them compare their answers to the key for quality control (thanks to Andy for suggesting this important step that I would have missed).

OK, now the bad news - things went so well on Tuesday with the group work I gave it another shot on Thursday with the same accelerated class. I had assigned some homework from the Connected Math book "Moving Straight Ahead" that included an experiment to collect data, graph it, and answer some questions. I should have been a little more alert when a number of students were confused and didn't attempt the experiment part. I should have reviewed it in detail before assigning it, and Andy suggested that doing a demo and collecting the data as a class would have been much better.

The group work involved creating group answers to the questions and then sharing from mini whiteboards with the class. I wasn't on top of the fact that significant portions of the class were not paying much attention to the presentations, and I didn't kick in firmer management when it was required during those presentations. Lesson learned (by me) and not enough learned by the students.