In IB Mathematical Studies, students have to be able to complete a Chi Squared Test to determine independence (or not) of two variables. The full process of carrying out a Chi Squared test is quite long, and so I decided to break it down into small steps, and get students to master each step before adding on the next one. The steps are listed in the image below, which I showed to students at the start of the unit.
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In IB Mathematical Studies students have to recognise the Vertex (Completed Square) Form and Root (Factorised) Form of a quadratic function. Although they have a graphical calculator to help them sketch the graphs, they need to know the links in order to find the equation of a given graph. This is utilised in analysing data and creating models that follow a parabola.
In previous years I have taught this through a guided investigation which has students use technology to discover what happens in each of these situations:
This year I decided to try something a little different, following one of the ideas from the amazing variationtheory.com, the activity type that Craig Barton calls Demonstration (https://variationtheory.com/demonstration/).
I started logarithms with my (second to bottom) S4 class this week, and I think I managed to introduce it in a way that really helped the students to understand what a logarithm is. First I started the lesson with this recap set of questions on indices. As the students were completing it I realised my error in including 4^(1/2) as this can lead to misconceptions that an index of 1/2 is the same as halving. I probed this after the class completed the questions by asking what 9^(1/2) is, and most of them correctly recalled that it was 3.
In this post I am going to share some of the ideas I use in my day to day lessons. These aren't lessons that I have prepared specifically for an observation, or those one-off lessons designed to engage/challenge students beyond the curriculum. These are the bread and butter of my teaching. The things I do every day and every unit. Some of these are things I have been doing for a while, some are relatively new, and a few are actually brand new (I have started them in the last few weeks). This post was inspired by this post (https://teachinnovatereflectblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/just-me-doing-what-i-do/) by Ben Gordon.
Planning the unit First off, I think it important to acknowledge the bigger picture for any lesson, and begin by planning the unit as a whole. Before anything else, I identify the different objectives I need to explicitly teach, as well as the prior knowledge students should have to be successful in this topic. Identifying all the individual items that will need to be covered in a given unit helps me clarify exactly what it is I need to do, and what I want the students to be able to do by the end of the unit. This is something I have always done, but the process has become much more rigorous since reading this excellent blog post (https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/my-best-planning-part-1/) by Kris Boulton. Below is an example for our first unit of Year 10 on Percentages. |
Dan Rodriguez-Clark
I am a maths teacher looking to share good ideas for use in the classroom, with a current interest in integrating educational research into my practice. Categories
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