Hi {{custom.firstName}},

 

Welcome to Unit 2! Let me offer you three verbs I hope you’ll find helpful this school year.

 

Invite. Celebrate. Develop.

 

Teachers have told us that a student’s success in our lessons depends on the teacher’s success with several different teaching moves, especially these three:

 

  • Inviting student thinking.
  • Celebrating student thinking.
  • Developing student thinking.


Throughout this unit, we’ll share with you the most helpful ideas we’ve learned for inviting student thinking in this program. We hope you’ll find them useful as well!

 

Start with the question, not the answer.

As you launch activities in these lessons, ask yourself, “What question can I ask here that’ll get the most early thinking out of students’ heads and into the classroom conversation?” 

 

In this unit, students will engage in a lot of “Number Talks” as warm-ups. Consider two possible questions you might use to introduce a number talk and the effect of each on the ideas a student might offer you.

 

"What is the answer?" v. "How are you seeing the answer?"

2 times 15

“What is the answer?” will likely elicit a small handful of answers, the most common of which will be 30.

 

“How are you seeing the answer?” is likely to elicit as many different answers as there are students in your class, each of which can help you build the rest of your lesson.

 

This is just one of what I hope will be many examples in our curriculum where starting with well-posed questions invites more student thinking than answers will.

 

Happy teaching!

 

Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team

PS. Please give us feedback on the last lesson.

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