Thursday, May 31, 2012

Let's try this again... Writing in Math, take 3

For the past two summers, I have posted about Writing in Math (see posts here and here). I still very strongly feel that writing is something I need to do, but I really struggle on the implementation.

In AP, writing is a natural part of the curriculum, but in Alg2, it is a bit more challenging for me. I had already been doing some searching on writing in algebra when Sam Shah posted a blog post last night about writing in math (see post here). When I did some more digging, I realized he had written before on Writing in Algebra 2, and I again felt convicted that this is an area where I have to do a better job.

Next Steps
After reading Sam's posts, I realized that I need to do some searching in our textbook resources. A lot of textbooks have "writing in math" supplements and/or questions in the homework sets. I need to gather a database of questions that are at my disposal in order to make this easy to use and implement. I also need to figure out how to add these writing prompts into my lessons and my assessments. I would like the students to do some practice and evaluation, similar to Sam's older post, so that we can discuss what makes a good or not-so-good response. I need to decide if these are done as exit cards, warmups, in their interactive notebook, etc. I don't think I'm ready for large writing assignments, I need just small prompts like "Without actually creating a graph, what information do you know about the graph of y= -3(x+4)^2 -1 ?"

My #summerlist has already grown... :)

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