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Friday, April 3, 2015

WODB Part 3

Today when students walked in I already had the room set up in a huge circle (15 sets of 2 desks) with the samples of WODB A to O that the two classes created yesterday. You can see them in the Day 2 post. As students walked in I handed them 15 choice and reason slips. Students were instructed to start at a letter and work their way around the room picking, top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right for each WODB and writing down their reason for choosing this option. They then folded their ballot and put it in the envelope which was also on the desks. It looked like this.

 
 
 


Once students worked their way around the room I had them analyse the data from the sample they started with. Here are the results:
 


Once this was done students filled in a sheet summarizing the reasons that were given. We then went back and looked at the criteria for what makes a good WODB. Here it is:


Students were then instructed to rank the A to O samples individually from strongest 1 to weakest 15 by looking at the samples, the final data of the distribution and comparing this to the criteria.
The back of the room was set up and looked like this for the ranking to occur.


Here are the slips.


And the final averages of the students rankings versus my rankings.

IMAGE
OVERWIJK RANK
STUDENT AVERAGE RANK
 
A
 
6
 
 
10
 
B
 
7
 
2
 
C
 
5
 
6
 
D
 
14
 
8
 
E
 
15
 
5
 
F
 
9
 
7
 
G
 
2
 
4
 
H
 
10
 
12
 
I
 
1
 
3
 
J
 
11
 
1
 
K
 
9
 
15
 
L
 
13
 
14
 
M
 
4
 
13
 
N
 
3
 
11
 
O
 
12
 
9
From what I can tell students valued the equal distribution heavily and I valued the distribution and the math equally ( now there is a surprise! ).

Lastly I really liked the structure of this 3 day lesson. I think you could do this in any course - including non-math courses.

Hope you enjoyed. I did.

5 comments:

  1. Alex - looks like a super fun activity that has a lot of value (especially in the spiralled classroom!)

    Excited to try something like this. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Kyle. I think it would be great near the end of the course-might be more math rich.

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  2. Hi Alex, thanks so much for posting the entire process of using WODB in the classroom! Two questions:
    1) How long are your class periods? The day 2 lesson in particular (where the students created their own WODB) seems like it would take a while... (my classes are 42 minutes long.)
    2) I struggle with encouraging deeper math thinking too (and I teach ELL's) - any thoughts for next time about extra scaffolding to encourage "better" (i.e. mathematically more rich) WODB's?

    Thank you again for these posts!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Chikae, Classes are 75 minutes. Mathematically more rich WODB's might have happened later in the course. I think I might have modelled making one with them relevant to the curriculum as a model would have helped.

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