Clip 8/15: Modeling with Polynomials Lesson - Part 2A

Overview

In the second half of the lesson, Amy Burke asks her 11th- and 12th-grade students to take one laptop per pair, moving into Step 4 of the lesson, in which they use the Desmos website to enter the data and interpret their findings. Student pairs talk as they focus on ensuring that they are entering the data accurately from the whiteboard. They consult their lesson worksheet as a guide. Students enter in the cut size as the x value and the volume as the y value on their graph, one offering that “It’s going to make a scatterplot.” Students zoom in and out on their graphs, evaluating whether they are entering in the data precisely.

Teacher Commentary

Inviting students to make a conjecture before even setting up an investigation, it can be really powerful, in terms of student discourse. Now again, these are juniors and seniors, so there are things that are easier in terms of just talking at all with juniors and seniors, versus freshmen in September. But I think that with all the junk that they were walking into, with so many of them having real negative experiences in math classrooms previously, just setting up those short amounts of time for them to speak to each other and to share their own thinking, I think that then leads into helping one another as they were putting the data points into Desmos, and drawing conclusions there.