Day 54: My first Stand and Talk!

Geometry
I did my first Stand and Talk today!  This was the material for the talk.  It occurred before we had talked about congruent polygons.  Students know about congruent angles and congruent segments, but not about congruent shapes.

I followed Sara VanDerWerf's Global Math Department talk about how to do Stand and Talks (also found in her blog post too).

Afterwards, we annotated the notes.  This is what the notes looked like.

Wins:

• When we moved to annotating the notes, it went really smoothly.  Students were certainly ready to hear it.
• Most students WERE talking about what they were supposed to.  
• It got people up and moving.  I was able to enforce the "no leaning" rule.

Opportunities:

• Most people were with people they were friends with - those groups were not necessarily talking about what they were supposed to be as much
• There were a lot of superficial noticing (the paper is white, the paper is heavy, etc)

Overall, I can see how this helps students to "See it before I show them and say it before I tell them".  That certainly happened in the class.

Moving forward, I am not sure what other lessons I can use these with.  At first glance, this is what I am thinking:

• Similar triangles
• Area (maybe a weird shape on a grid)
• Compound volumes/surface areas

I also think I can do this in CS...  I wonder if I can do new syntax for things like for-loops or nested conditionals(?).  I might even be able to do it for predicting code output(?) . I need to think about it a bit more.

AP CSP
Today we did Dan's set of practice problems on organizing code using functions and loops.  Honestly, both yesterday AND today could have each been two days.  I think there is value in both writing code themselves and reading others' code. Next year, I think I would do one set of problems at the END of unit 3 (before we do the project) and the other set to kick off unit 5.  I also think I would do a "code-along" of one of the problems to model how to think through these problems.

First hour I let them just go, and they didn't do a good job using functions.  The second hour we looked at the second problem and thought about where we saw functions that MIGHT exist.  Then students did a lot better.

I think also having students doing pair programming yesterday, helped them be successful today when they were working individually.

With that being said, I think we still need practice writing functions - I think I can incorporate that into our unit 5 lessons.

One Good Thing
I love getting to try new things, so that was a good thing today.