Kim S Round Reflection

Adam Nye

LetinaJeranyama

Kim’s Round Reflection

On Friday, 2/12/16 I attended Kim Wynja’s math round dealing with similar triangles. The lesson tasked students with outlining different triangles, cutting them out, and then investigating whether or not the triangles were similar. To determine whether or not the triangles were similar, students were supposed to match up the respective legs of two triangles, one atop the other, and eyeball whether or not the angles matched up. Students executed this same process for many different triangles, but the dimensions for each were reached through division, multiplication, subtraction, and addition. Ideally, students should leave the lesson understanding the concept of a scale factor. That is, triangles whose side lengths are multiples or divisions of another triangle will be similar to that triangle. Subtraction and addition, however, will not result in similar triangles. Students worked both individually and in groups throughout the activity.

Overall, I found the lesson planning and implementation to be effective. The class was designed to encourage students to engage with the material individually, but also allowed them to fall upon fellow group-mates when the going got tough. Furthermore, the design forced theoretical math into tangibility; instead of just talking about similarity and what that might mean using something like an overhead projector, the students actually created triangles and then physically compared them to determine similarity, or lack thereof. At the end of the lesson, Kim showed a brief video that reinforced scale factor through Lego villages, detailing how many models are made to be similar replicas: exactly the same shape, but not the same size.

The biggest issue I noticed throughout the round was cheating. The lesson was designed so that students could work with each other to overcome learning obstacles, but instead students either divided labor or copied answers once one student had completed the activity. The result, at least in the group I sat with, was a well thought out lesson that truly benefited one student, but allowed others to slip through the cracks. Of course, inhibiting student cheating in the classroom during group work is an extremely difficult task. It is easy to suggest monitoring groups as a potential solution, but impossible to adequately monitor six groups at the same time. This is particularly true with students who are firmly committed to doing the least amount of work possible, which appeared to be the case for at least one of the students I sat with. We had a brief chat about why she was choosing to wait and copy instead of engaging with the material, and she responded that doing so was simply easier for her, and she prefers to take the easy way out at all times. Furthermore, when I probed her about instant gratification vs longer-term benefits, she acknowledged that she often chooses the path that presents the least difficulty at any time, regardless of how much more difficult it might make things later on. In my experience, students like this girl are the most challenging students to motivate, so I am leery of suggesting that Kim could have changed something in the lesson to motivate the girl I sat with.

Overall, I believe Kim planned well, and students who chose to engage benefited from the lesson.