Top Tip No. 4: Become a detective for student brilliance.
Hi {{custom.firstName}},
Here’s some advice that expert Desmos teachers still work on daily. The teachers who have reported the most success with this program have seen themselves as detectives for student brilliance.
It’s easy for me to ask students a question and hold up my own answer, or the answer from a student who looks or thinks like me, as the standard for brilliance. But we build learning and relationships when we assume all of our students have something brilliant to offer and then work hard to find and celebrate that brilliance.
What does it look like in practice?
On Screen 2 in Plenty of Polyhedra, we ask students to share how prisms and pyramids are different. Students will answer with lots of different degrees of mathematical precision. Some might refer to “sides” when later in this unit they’ll refer to “faces.” Students may describe the “pointiness” of some shapes and the flatness of other shapes.
We hope you’ll find ways to celebrate the brilliance of those ideas without worrying that they aren’t as developed as they will be later in the lesson and the unit.
With that celebration, you’ll help your students develop their sense of mathematics and their sense of themselves as mathematicians.
Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team
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