Yenca often takes a moment to show the whole class everyone else’s answers. 'When you come across something that’s not just skill, drill, kill, and is kinda rich, it gets your attention.' Cathy Yenca, middle school math teacher “When you have that reaction from middle schoolers around math, that’s a win.” She sees how peers influence one another’s thinking, and that even if not every student is on the right track the whole time, they are figuring it out together. “Watching how they change a parameter and that instant feedback of what they just changed and how that impacts a graph, they’re hooked,” Yenca said. Instead, she set up a task where through exploration they were telling her the lesson by the end of class. But she didn’t tell students that’s what they were studying. She uses Desmos because it makes inquiry in math class easy.įor example, in one recent lesson with her algebra one students, Yenca was teaching transformations in quadratic functions. “When you come across something that’s not just skill, drill, kill, and is kinda rich, it gets your attention,” she said. Her students all have iPads and Yenca is passionate about the power of tech in learning, but she hasn’t liked a lot of what’s out there for math specifically. Wanting her students to be familiar with the tool, she started experimenting with it in the classroom and it has now become an instructional “necessity.” Yenca works at Hill Country Middle School, a public school in Austin. Middle school math teacher Cathy Yenca started using Desmos when her district discovered the graphing calculator tool was going to be integrated on state tests in Texas, where she teaches. “Written feedback about the work tends to focus on the work itself.” “Getting numerical or binary right-wrong feedback tends to make the student think about the self,” Meyer said. Meyer hopes to support teachers as they design lessons that have some common elements of good math instruction: Students are thinking beyond equations, the learning is social, processes are made visible and students get written feedback, often from peers. Teachers can also display all the solutions, with or without student names, and ask the class to analyze each other’s strategies. Or, maybe each student submits the problem they devised for other students to work on. Teachers could also have students create their own glass filling at a specific rate and ask them to graph that. “Our core assumption is that students need to be aware that there are other students in the class, and that refining process is part of every math lesson,” Meyer said. Teachers can shut off this function, but Desmos intentionally made it a default to encourage discussion. When a student submits his graph, a Desmos default function then shows the student three other student answers and asks him to give feedback on the solutions. One slide might have a video of a glass filling with water, with a question asking students to graph it. In contrast, Desmos allows teachers to make a series of slides with interactive elements. Meyer argues this model doesn’t capture what’s powerful about a class full of students. “Typically, online math platforms have no concept of the student in relationship to other students,” Meyer said in reference to “personalized” programs where students work through a set of problems or concepts “at their own pace,” but do so in a vacuum. And, a math classroom at its best is also a place where students are creating hypotheses, testing their thinking, critiquing each other’s work and discussing how and why mathematical laws work. Meyer says students love the internet because it’s a social place to share and create. Led by Chief Academic Officer Dan Meyer, a former math teacher who left the classroom to pursue a PhD in math education, Desmos has been using its platform to model how technology could change pedagogy.ĭesmos tries to harness the social nature of online interactions into meaningful math inquiry. Recently, Desmos has been building out its platform to offer customizable lessons. It's really hard to use this tool in a traditional boring way.' Audrey McLaren, math teacher in Quebec, Canada 'This tool is transforming how I'm teaching stuff. That’s why some educators are excited to see Desmos - an ed-tech product best known for offering an online graphing calculator - adding features that promote inquiry. Math instruction can be the most resistant to changes in pedagogy - even schools that have had success with project-based learning or inquiry-centered approaches can struggle to teach math in ways that help students understand the rich connections and complexity of the subject.
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