Lessons

 

How Can I Use the Materials?

Materials are structured in linked pairs of lessons. Each pair of closely related lessons is preceded by a starter which allows the students to be assessed before teaching the lessons.

The lessons are designed to help you, the teacher, assess what students know and may find difficult as well as to allow you to give them feedback and guide them throughout the next steps. As such, the lessons were guided by the following principles:

• To set activities in realistic contexts. By realistic, we do not mean that all activities need to be set in real-life contexts that students may have encountered, but rather that the contexts created here are ones students and learners can imagine and actively engage with. As such, we have tried to make these activities as intriguing as possible while at the same time providing students an opportunity to engage with mathematical structures.

• To make connections between mathematical ideas often taught separately. For example, we tried to conceive activities bringing together the often fragmented activities of tabulating values, solving equations, drawing graphs, and forming and transforming algebraic expressions and relations.

• To encourage collaboration between students. By working together and talking with each other, students are given an insight into each other’s thinking process and teachers an opportunity to easily assess what they understand and where there might be lacks.

• To use different representations and thus help learners better understand mathematical concepts via multiple channels.

The Mini-assessments

The mini-assessments assigned to each lesson block are designed for you to assess what the students know and what they might already have difficulties with. During the assessment, try to listen and observe rather than teach, allowing the task to remain unresolved if necessary.

Attached to each starter are suggestions of a few things for you to pay specific attention to when observing students. These should help you analysing students’ response and adapt your lessons for your own class.

For a sample Algebra assessment starter, click here

The Lesson Materials

Within the pack available to participating teachers, each lesson is presented as two double-page spreads. Though you are not required to read all of it before teaching the lessons for the first time, you may nonetheless find it useful. If you are short of time, we have included an outline for each lesson on the first page which should give you enough information to teach the lesson. This overview may also help you think about formative assessments and feedbacks in general and the ways in which you may adapt them to your lessons.

For more information on our lesson package, visit our Algebra and Multiplicative Reasoning pages.