General Strategies
Tasks
A strategy that the curriculum unit will employ is rich and meaningful math tasks. Rich math tasks are a way to incorporate the Common Core math practices into daily routines. Rich math tasks are accessible to all learners. Rich math tasks use real-world applications and have multiple representations or approaches. They have various entry points so learners at all levels are able to contribute. Math tasks are collaborative, engaging, and make connections across topics. Based on district-wide and regional math meetings, and conferences, and research, it is clear to me that the education trend encourages the use of meaningful math tasks.
My research led me to the book What Does Math Have to Do with It? by Jo Boaler. She shares the results of her longitudinal studies in a narrative form and sheds light on the benefits of teaching with rich math tasks. She describes the classrooms that utilize task models where students of mixed abilities work in cooperative groups. The students are challenged to solve complicated, open-ended tasks. Then she observes students working in a more traditional setting. In the traditional setting students tend to work in isolation using problems in a textbook. Boaler conducts her study twice: each time in two different schools on two different continents. The results are the same. The students who worked with a task model outperformed the traditional methods. The task model also improved girls’ achievement. This is believed to be because girls really want to understand why a math formula or method works. In traditional settings, girls became less successful and the answers to the why question were more fleeting. Based on this research, I want to incorporate more tasks into my teaching. Tasks will be sprinkled throughout the curriculum unit, sometimes as warm-ups and sometimes as the main activity.
Cooperative Learning
I will use cooperative learning groups of mixed abilities throughout this curriculum unit. The students will benefit from talking math and from working together to find solutions. Through the use of cooperative groups, students will learn from each other and benefit from each other’s insights.
Hands-On Explorations
This entire curriculum unit involves hands-on learning. Covering surfaces with squares, tracing the outside of a shape with a linear unit, drawing area models on graph paper, to cutting apart and reconfiguring quadrilaterals almost the entire curriculum unit will involve hands-on activities.
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