Hi {{custom.firstName}},

 

One way we’ll support your growth this year is through these periodic "lesson preview" emails, each of which will highlight something interesting, delightful, or new about a lesson you’re about to teach.

 

For these first five lesson preview emails, I’ll share with you five of the top tips Desmos teachers have found helpful for their work in past years. (If you’d rather not receive these emails, no problem—just turn them off in “Manage Preferences” below.)

 

Top Tip No. 1: Nobody needs to finish everything.

 

Learning is everywhere and it’s happening all the time. Students learn when they finish screens correctly, but also when they see other student responses on their screen, when they compare their ideas with a neighbor’s, and when they take a shower the next day and a thought pops into their head about scale factors. You know this is true for yourself in your own learning!

 

If you find yourself running short on time, if you find some students ready to move on and others needing more time, please tell yourself the truth that your students will still learn even if they don’t finish every screen correctly, even if they don’t finish every screen at all.

This is a wonderful realization: learning doesn’t just live in the checkmark on a successfully completed screen.

Learning also happens when you post-teach, drawing from whatever ideas students have offered you—right or wrong. So don’t wait to move on until every student has finished every screen correctly. Move on when enough students have had enough experience in the lesson to benefit from a post-teaching conversation.

 

What does this look like in practice?

In More Visual Patterns, we ask students to describe and analyze patterns of shapes as they change and grow.

 

If you wait until every student finishes every screen correctly before synthesizing their work, you risk running out of time and boring students who are ready to move on. Instead, consider starting your lesson synthesis when most students have seen every screen. Every student will benefit from that synthesis, and you’ll successfully complete the lesson.

Dan & the Desmos Classroom team

PS. Please give us feedback on the last lesson.

P.S. How’d your last lesson go? Let us know in the lesson feedback form while the memory is still fresh. Click your rating and then click “Submit.” Give us some answers to the other questions if you have time, but don’t worry about them if you don’t.

 

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