Here is the last tip I’ll pass along to you from the teachers who have experienced success with this program in years past.
Top Tip #5: Post-teach rather than pre-teach.
Many curricula ask you to pre-teach mathematical ideas to students: to explain ideas to students at the start of class and ask students to use them later. We’ve designed this program so that students can work on early screens without your help. Students will likely experience the need for new mathematical ideas at some point during the lesson, and that’s the perfect time to offer an explanation, one that ideally celebrates and makes connections to the ideas students have offered throughout the activity.
What does it look like in practice?
In Predicting Diseases, we ask students to create models that describe polio case data. You could definitely pre-teach them the fact that none of those models are adequate to describe a decaying relationship.
Instead we encourage you to elicit their ideas about those models, however briefly. Let them experience the surprise and then post-teach. Help them understand why this is a new kind of relationship that needs a new kind of function.
Your students will learn more math when you post-teach, and they’ll learn more about their own power as mathematical thinkers as well.
Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team
PS. Please give us feedback on the last lesson.
That’s the last preview email I’ll send you in Unit 1. Please bookmark this link and let us know how these lessons go for you. Every bit of your feedback a) makes every lesson better and b) puts another ticket with your name on it into a raffle for Desmos gear and other prizes.
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