Daily Archives: October 10, 2021

Oct 10 2021

Compare & Discuss/Multiple Strategies

Have you seen…this important resource for our teaching?

From researchers at Harvard University and Vanderbilt University, the Compare and Discuss Multiple Strategies (CDMS) routine, and the curriculum materials for algebra courses?

Explore the curriculum materials and learn how to use the resources. See the About page for a summary of the Create & Discuss/Multiple Strategies routine which it is suggested should take about 20 minutes.

See also “One way is the wrong way to do math. Here’s the right way.” from The Harvard Gazette

https://www.compareanddiscuss.com/

Within each resource, you will find questions that could be used for discussion of the example, a “think-pair-share” routine and a “Big Idea” page that summarises the lesson objective for the example.

The teacher’s guide also explains each of the four strategies.

Compare & Discuss/Multiple Strategies – from researchers at Harvard University and Vanderbilt University

As you can see from the image here you can filter the resources by Type, Lesson Use and Topic, within each topic you will find several subtopics.

Oct 10 2021

Fill in the blanks …

These resources can now be found on a page, Fill in the blanks, part of the Problems & Activities Collection. New activities have been added to this original collection.

Trigonometry (Area) – Fill In The Blanks, Andy Lutwyche

There is also a good deal of evidence that the use of worked examples can
be helpful in introducing new ideas (Booth et al., 2017; Sweller et al., 2019).
Particularly effective are ‘completion problems’ where students are given
partial solutions and required to complete them. These can help students to
focus on the examples but also manage the difficulty level while retaining
authentic tasks

Great Teaching Toolkit – Evidence Review, June 2020 Rob Coe, C.J. Rauch, Stuart Kime, Dan Singleton
Great Teaching Toolkit – Evidence Review, June 2020

In dimension 4, Activating Hard Thinking, we see this element on explaining. Part-worked examples can be so useful when presenting new concepts and ideas to students.

So this week, a collection of fill in the blanks type resources.

The trigonometry activity above is from Andy Lutwyche; Andy has other resources in his fill in the blanks series. Searching his TES resources on “fill in the blanks“, returns other fill in the blanks resources and also other resources where students must complete missing information such as his What was the question or Spiders collections. Some of Andy’s latest resources include his Lazy Lionel resources, Lionel does not show his working, so loses marks! We also have Hasty Hazel and Methodical Mabel, this really is excellent and I’m sure can promote excellent conversations in the classroom on misconceptions and showing sufficient working. And I must include Andy’s brilliant resource on the quadratic formula.

  • Andy Lutwyche
  • Ratio and Proportion, Andy Lutwyche
  • Andy Lutwyche
  • Quadratic Formula, Andy Lutwyche

So many teachers share their resources, for more of this type of activity, try the following:

  • Dr Austin Maths
  • TickTockMaths – Rationalising the denominator
  • Starting Points Maths, prime factorisation
  • Starting Points Maths, Collecting like terms
  • Access Maths, Algebra
  • Purposeful Maths, Expanding double brackets
  • Purposeful Maths, Completing the square
  • Distributive Property, Open Middle
  • Rob Southern, Coordinate Geometrye
  • Coordinate Geometry Table, Transum, Adapted with permission from a learning resource created by Rob Southern @mrsouthernmaths.
  • Underground Maths, Two-way functions

From Jonathan Hall on Mathsbot, try his Directed Number.

Mathsbot – Directed Number
Nathan Day – Factor Trees
Access Maths – Algebra, Multiplying Expressions