Lesson Study Cycle 1​
Research Theme: Find ways to empower students to analyze their reactions and experiences with texts through extracting meaningful evidence to communicate their understanding and opinions.​
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Content Understanding Goal: Students will understand how differences in the graphs of polynomials are evident in their equations.
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Lesson Plan
We looked to increase collaboration and question asking between students by exploring new mathematical content through a Desmos activity where students shared a device while working in pairs.
Before the Lesson
Students had ample experience working through activities on Desmos although always on individual devices. They had familiarity with quadratic equations in factored form including how the zeros relate to the factors as well as the graph. Students have just completed a unit of study on exponential functions. This lesson presents a shift into a new conceptual unit that builds off of knowledge from their previous years of math content. They have not seen any math in this lesson explicitly since the previous school year.
Lesson Strategy
1. Begin with a notice and wonder warm up comparing a quadratic function in standard form with the same one in factored form. Students begin with independent think time when they journal in their notebook, then share with their table groups, and finally the teacher collects ideas from volunteers on the whiteboard.
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2. Students are reminded of the co-created group norms before being told that they will share a device with a partner. One partner will be responsible for using the device on odd numbered Desmos screens while the other will use the device on the even numbered Desmos screens.
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3. Students work through the Desmos activity with their partner asking questions when necessary. The class is stopped periodically by the teacher to clarify common misconceptions that are appearing and to discuss slides with pivotal understandings to emphasize their importance.
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4. Students are asked what they are confident in and what they have questions about as an exit slip.
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SEE SLIDES BELOW:
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Focal Students
Focus Student 1
This student is articulate and well-liked amongst his peers. He displays many signs of math anxiety and has verbally expressed outside of class time that math is challenging for him to start when he is not confident in his knowledge of the process. He has been consistently challenged throughout the semester in task initiation and on-topic discourse with his classmates. His willingness to attempt any math during class time has increased over the course of the semester but lags significantly behind his peers. During this lesson, he was paired with another very quiet student and did not share any ideas with his partner.
02
Focus Student 2
This student has several very close friends in the class but has missed the majority of the semester due to mental health related challenges. He has no confidence in math and self-identifies as having fourth grade level understanding. He will engage in notes or activities initially but is quick to give up and has little belief that he can achieve understanding in the math classroom. He was paired with a quiet student who has a much stronger self-conception of being a mathematician and did attempt problems on the Desmos activity. This were not talkative but collaboration was evident.
Student Work
Reflection
Pairing two students with one device for a desmos classroom activity appeared to be very successful for the majority of students in the classroom. The focal students, however, had varied success depending on the partnership. When quieter students with low confidence were paired together, very few questions were generated and collaboration was scarce. The pairings where quieter students were paired with more active and vocal partners had more success in working through the activity and generating questions between each other. If we were to repeat this lesson, we would use the same device-sharing strategy per partnership but more strategically pick the pairings. Using this activity on a lesson where most students were not confident and the material was new was probably more effective than doing an activity at the end of a unit where one student would be more tempted to control the device during the activity. Students did not feel a status disparity within their pairings for the most part because the material felt new to all of them. Many students were able to show understanding of the content goal and wrote questions for further exploration on their exit slip. I would like to further explore the connection between students discussing in their partnerships and their willingness to speak in whole class discussions as I would like to build a community of learners who are eager to share question with everyone.