Friday, September 5, 2014

CCTM 2014: Beyond Rise over Run: Activities to invent and connect slope's five faces

Slope has five—count 'em, five—faces. Students shouldn’t focus on just one or two, and in this session, neither will we! Instead, we'll explore realistic and meaningful activities and a learning progression designed to help students invent and make connections between all of slope’s five faces
(This is a shortened version of the session I facilitated at NCTM 2014.) 

Below are links to the handout for the session, a research paper that describes the approach in more detail, and a link to the complete unit for teachers and others to use. Please download, modify, and use the tasks with your students!

Thursday, April 10, 2014

NCTM 2014: Beyond rise over run!

Research talk and gallery workshop for teachers


   

Again, similar titles to my previous presentations, but again, a lot has changed in my thinking around our study of slope in 2012. At NCTM 2014, I presented the updates in a research talk and a gallery workshop for teachers. Here are all of the resources for those presentations, as well as a link to the complete unit for teachers and others to use. Please download, modify, and use the tasks with your students!

Gallery workshop for teachers
  • Handout (1 MB PDF file)
  • Slides (16 MB PDF file)
  • Download the complete unit to use in your classroom (34 MB .zip file; MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and a PDF reader are required to view and edit files)


Research session talk:

Abstract:

I present a local instructional theory for slope that emerged during a design experiment in a high-school Algebra I classroom. In the design experiment, students explored situations related to making predictions. As students engaged with these situations, they reinvented and made-meaningful multiple sub-constructs of slope. I show that this process involved the assemblage and coordination of mathematical artifacts, and I introduce the notion of a cascade of artifacts to describe this process. I suggest that artifacts are inextricably bound with activity, and I discuss the nature of the classroom activities that promoted the development of the cascade of artifacts.

Resources: