Clip 2/15: Modeling with Polynomials Pre-Lesson Part 2

Overview

Continuing their pre-lesson collaborative conversation, Amy Burke appreciates Deidre Grevious for sharing her students for the documented lesson. Amy notes that while she does not know the students as well as she would like, she will incorporate strategies to differentiate instruction and provide needed support and resources.

Amy and Deidre discuss how they took an existing lesson and enhanced it to increase students’ interaction with the ideas. Amy points out that she hopes moving between different representations — building boxes and using tactile modalities, then analyzing a class table representing a larger data set, then moving to using Desmos as a tool to enter the data and view the table and graphs in different ways — will help students build connections. Amy says she hopes to return to the physical model at the end of the lesson, though they may not have enough time to do so.

Teacher Commentary

What I love about teaching is the students. I love being in spaces with students, and having opportunities to point out to them how smart they are. I know that's now a loaded word with growth mindset, but I still use it, that recognizing what their contributions are, and shining them back to them, and doing it publicly. Because, in my anecdotal experience, I've seen how good it makes kids feel. They're recognized in a classroom, particularly in math classrooms.

My teaching has changed tremendously since beginning. I'm still a math teacher, and math is what I care about most within education, because it's a gatekeeper, and because there's so much status connected to it. And my friends, when I first started teaching in Berkeley, would laugh at me when I'd tell them stories from my classroom. They'd say, “You're not teaching math, you're teaching how to be a person.” I feel like over the years, I'm always teaching math, but that's only the avenue to get to teaching about resilience, persistence, and curiosity.