Creativity

Resources for ‘What if…?’

What if you wanted to learn more about incorporating What if…? into your mathematics teaching routine. You’re in the right place. Below, you will find some resources to help you get started. Click here to share your thoughts or ask a question.

You’ll need to start with a rich task. I’ve listed some other great resources for these types of problems at the end of this post. Below you will find some structures to use to support students as they begin to think in terms of What if…?

Helpful tips:

  • Provide students with time to think privately about one of the questions in the template.
  • Provide students with time to talk with a partner/group about their What if…? ideas.
  • When it’s time to share as a class, be patient. It may take a minute to get sharing started – especially if this is the first experience with What if…?

Other resources for rich tasks:

Share your experiences, questions, and comments about using What if…?. Keep the conversation going.

The Best Part about Blogging

This is super exciting!  I love it when teachers keep thinking – especially when I stop!  What you’re about to read is truly the best part of blogging!

Readers of Under the Dome have been terrific commenters and questioners of my posts over the last 2 years and you all just keep getting better.  Recently, Sharon Wagner, a teacher I met during a three-day summer institute in June visited my blog and reached out to share her ideas about the Olympic Cola Display 3-act task.

Sharon’s words:

Screen Shot 2015-08-16 at 7.34.10 PM

Through the course of a few emails over the summer and a lot of my time spent doing things outside of the MTBoS (my lovely wife got some of her honey-do’s completed and I got some of my Mike-do’s finished) I have Sharon’s extension and am now posting it with her blessing!  Please take a look.  Her idea is a natural extension and allows students to design their own display using the colors of Coca-Cola twelve packs (which she most helpfully added to her document).  Any Pepsi fans out there?

Sharon’s idea also ups the rigor by providing an audience (the merchant).  This, again, is a part of that natural extension (of course someone designs these displays for the merchants).  As for the Standards for Mathematical Practice . . . let’s just say your students will be engaging in multiple SMPs.

Again, this is super exciting.  I love to share my ideas here, but when someone else takes it and makes it better – in this case by adding to it – everyone wins.  Especially the students in our classrooms.

Thank you Sharon.

Sharon’s Display Extension:

coca cola display project extension