I'm taking these straight from Dan's post:
- Ask every student to guess how long it'll take to fill up the water tank before you explain to them how to find the volume of a prism. (See: lots of other examples just like that.)
- Ask every student to draw a triangle with given constraints before you explain why those constraints result in the same triangle.
- Ask every student to try to draw a line that's parallel to another given line before you explain to them how you can determine whether or not two lines are parallel.
- Ask every student to guess the age of an individual before you explain the definition of absolute value and use it to figure out who guessed closest.
- Ask every student to take and submit a photo of stairs before you show your own photo and explain how we can figure out which is steepest.
- Ask every student to write down two numbers that add up to five before you explain why our pairs all seem to show up on the same line.
These are all ideas I can implement in my classroom on my own- without the technology. Eventually, this will be created and become the norm in education. But why wait? Let's teach better math now.
What other ideas can we come up with that creates an intellectual need for students to learn more?
Here's an example I did in Algebra II - the discussions we had were phenomenal and all it took was a bunch of students coming to the board and drawing some kind of line! Any line! From there we took turns trying to describe what each student's line represented.
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http://mrwardteaches.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/graph-storytelling/
Thanks for sharing!
DeleteI LOVE Dan Meyer activities. I'm working towards trying to get students to be ready for the smarter balanced assessments however I'm looking for in relation to this a really strong method for students to start asking themselves TOPS/Marzano questions. I've been looking and found a couple of things that help us to remind students about methods like: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/133901720/Marzanos-Nine-Top-Strategies but I really did like the "Holes" activity because it does not have a "final" solution, the students had to have a "battle" or discussion panel on why their answer was more accurate (or could be considered correct) and how to "prove it." I just find the students journals are so very weak in asking their own critical thinking questions to solve their own problem. They want us to do it for them!
ReplyDeleteWhat things are you using to help prepare for smarter balanced assessments? Do you have the link for the common core lesson plan template you mentioned earlier?
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