Top Tip No. 4: Become a detective for student brilliance.
Hi {{custom.firstName}},
Here’s some advice that many 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 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 the next lesson?
On Screen 3 in Tiles, we ask students to describe patterns they see in a table. A college math student might say something formal and precise like, “To find the large area, you multiply the small area by the square of a scale factor.” It’s easy to see the brilliance in that student’s idea.
Consider noticing and celebrating a range of ideas instead—everything from “the area gets bigger” to “the area gets bigger than I thought it would” to “it’s multiplied by 4.”
“That’s such a brilliant idea,” you can say. “To find the larger area, do you always multiply by 4, or is that something special here?”
That’s one way you can develop a student’s sense of mathematics and of themselves as a mathematician in this math program.
Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team
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