BYOSW - The Task
By Max Ray-Riek
March 24, 2017
I hope you can join me on Friday, April 7, at 11:30 a.m. at Session 424: BYOSW: How Bring Your Own Student Work Can Revolutionize Teacher Collaboration.
While you don’t have to bring your own student work to come with us, I really hope that as many of you as possible will find some students and try this task with them, and find a way to capture their work on paper (whether it’s posters or printed photographs or pencil and paper or….). If you
do, please bring enough copies of student work to share with 2 other people.
Here’s the task, from a couple of different perspectives:
One way to look at this is as a visual patterns task. Ask students how they would count the “dots” in each successive image, and then to make some predictions about dots around more hexagons:
There’s also a story to go with these images, if you prefer to do a read-aloud and ask students “What do you hear?” or “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” The story is about seating arrangements for the Teddy Bear’s wedding banquet (the tables are the hexagons, the brown dots
are seats). You can
get a PDF of the story here.
And you can let your students’ wonderings drive the explanation, or you can challenge them with some
specific problems that the Math Forum chose (PDF).
For student work, you might bring:
- Just your students’ noticings and wonderings, or
- Individual students’ or groups of students’ work figuring out how many bears can sit at different numbers of tables, or
- Individual students’ or groups of students’ work figuring out a rule for how many bears can sit at any given number of tables, or
- Individual students’ or groups of students’ work figuring out how many tables are needed for different numbers of bears
During the workshop, we’ll reflect on different goals in using this problem, and then we will plan specific follow-up activities based on student thinking by your students, for your goals.
Then we’ll reflect on the ways this is different than other kinds of PD, what the advantages and disadvantages are, and how to deal with the logistics of such PD!