The Roots of the Equation

A Way to Foster Productive Struggle?

My school has been trying to better create conditions for productive struggle in our classes, because a lot of students have taken a very receiving stance. So early in our Area and Volume unit, I decided to use this task from Illustrative Mathematics.

The task is a 7th grade task, and so involved nothing new for my high school geometry students – just area and perimeter/circumference. But the task has a lot of parts, not all of which are obvious from looking at it. So I gave them task, and then I was “less helpful.” In fact, I barely spoke during the lesson, only quietly clarifying things, but reflecting their proximity questions back towards themselves and their other group members.

Almost every group that attempted the task solved the problem on their own. (I followed up with an extension where they designed their own stained class on the coordinate plane and found the price using the same pricing, for those who finished quickly.) I had a group of three girls who don’t usually feel very confident in my class feel like rock stars after figuring the whole thing out themselves.

A few days ago, I saw this tweet:

Consider complex problems which require content from earlier grades…
with Jason Zimba at #coreadvocates pic.twitter.com/VM2wxPi1G5

— MarleneLovanio (@mlovanio) May 20, 2018

I thought it really applied here. While the content was still related to what we were learning in high school geometry, the opportunity to solve a complex task with little scaffolding was really helped by using a task from an earlier grade. I recommend it.