THINKING GENERATOR BEST PRACTICE
“Would you rather have two 8″ pizzas or one 12″ pizza?”
The pizza question above is an excellent TG for a lesson on finding the area of a circle. It focuses student thinking on the relationship betweeen diameter and area, it engages everyone (because it’s pizza), it spotlights an important concept in exponents in geometry, and it’s applicable.
However, it’s easy to mistake its elegant simplicity as lacking rigor and come up with something like the following:
“Peter sees that two small 8″ pizzas cost 19.99, and one medium 12” pizza cost 24.99. If he wants to get the better deal, which option should he choose?
He is sharing with 8 friends. How much should the remaining friends each pay if 3 of them can only offer $1, $.87, and $1.12, respectively?”
Although this could be a great performance task, this is not an effective TG to introduce the area of a circle. If students already know how to solve it, then they learned little new by doing it. If students didn’t know how to solve it, they just wasted 45 minutes NOT learning how to do it. Thinking is productive struggle; blindly guessing not knowing even which direction to look is just struggle.
TGs should make students think specifically about an area that can then lead them to an “aha!” moment. That’s it.
(P.S. A 12″ pizza has more than double the area of an 8″ pizza.)
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
MONDAY AFTERNOON: All staff report to the auditorium immediately after dismissal to learn about the school’ promotion process.
IMMIGRATION REMINDER: News have reported that last Friday ICE officers visited a school very nearby to pick up a 4th grader.
The law is the law, and we have a legal responsibility to cooperate with authorities once all documents have been verified.
But we also have an ethical responsibility to minimize the trauma and harm such an incident could have on all of our students. While I’m not going to comment on the authorities decision to pick up a student during school hours, I will ask all staff to be prudent in protecting our students’ emotional well-being as politics spill into schools.
WEDNESDAY, May 17th is Family Night. 4-7PM. Please refer to the staff memo for information.
THURSDAY, May 18th: SHREK OPENING NIGHT
NEW STAFF SPOTLIGHT: Vanessa Wyckoff
STEM Summer Opportunity:
Back in 2015, NYU Tandon School of Engineering made a pledge to the White House to educate 500 teachers and positively impact 50,000 public school students throughout NYC by 2025. This summer they are offering the following programs to teachers:
- Middle-school educators may wish to take part in a program on advancing STEM in the classroom with robotics (http://engineering.nyu.edu/mechatronics/DRK-12/).
· They could find it beneficial to be embedded in a professional learning community informed by their research on project-based learning, social cognitive career theory, and effective PD guidelines (http://engineering.nyu.edu/mechatronics/ITEST/index.hmtl).
· Both groups can sign up to take part in a unique, six-week summer workshop that will find them gaining personal experience in the lab and in an entrepreneurial setting (http://engineering.nyu.edu/mechatronics/smart).
Please note that all programs offer teachers a stipend for completing requirements.
Applications can be found at http://engineering.nyu.edu/k12stem/educators/ and if you have any questions please email k12.stem@nyu.edu.
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