Teachers can use a pattern task to promote and foster generalizing in the mathematics classroom, presenting opportunities to build on students’ thinking and extending ideas to new contexts.
Browse
Allyson Hallman-Thrasher, Susanne Strachota, and Jennifer Thompson
Michael S. Meagher, Michael Todd Edwards, and S. Asli Özgün-Koca
Using technology to explore a rich task, students must reconcile discrepancies between graphical and analytic solutions. Technological reasons for the discrepancies are discussed.
Amanda K. Riske, Catherine E. Cullicott, Amanda Mohammad Mirzaei, Amanda Jansen, and James Middleton
We introduce the Into Math Graph tool, which students use to graph how “into" mathematics they are over time. Using this tool can help teachers foster conversations with students and design experiences that focus on engagement from the student’s perspective.
Kelly Curtis, Katrina Lindo, and Amanda Jansen
When a ninth-grade teacher used discourse moves aligned with responding to students’ thinking and explicitly promoting productive dispositions, her students reported having positive experiences.
Danielle R. Divis and Tyler Johnson
This practitioner article describes a lesson carried out in a high school classroom at the conclusion of a unit on exponential growth. Two teachers use a series of music-related activities to engage students in using and connecting multiple representations of exponential growth while exploring musical frequencies on a piano.
Micah S. Stohlmann
An escape room can be a great way for students to apply and practice mathematics they have learned. This article describes the development and implementation of a mathematical escape room with important principles to incorporate in escape rooms to help students persevere in problem solving.
Tim Erickson
We modify a traditional bouncing ball activity for introducing exponential functions by modeling the time between bounces instead of the bounce heights. As a consequence, we can also model the total time of bouncing using an infinite geometric series.
Joe F. Allison
When I was in graduate school, my math professor, using a straightedge and a compass, marked off a unit distance and then halved it. He said he could halve the exact ½ again and exactly get ¼. He was leading up to infinite series.
Erin E. Baldinger, Matthew P. Campbell, and Foster Graif
Students need opportunities to construct definitions in mathematics. We describe a sorting activity that can help students construct and refine definitions through discussion and argumentation. We include examples from our own work of planning and implementing this sorting activity to support constructing a definition of linear function.
