Math is Tough!
When consulting with a high school in Southern California recently, I taught a lesson on graphing linear equations to Algebra I students. While I was teaching the lesson, I randomly selected non-volunteers to Check for Understanding, and through the student responses I found some very interesting math misconceptions!
The lesson I am sharing with you is a DataWORKS EDI Lesson. This page is referred to as Concept Development. In this lesson component, the teacher defines the concept with a bulletproof definition and then explains some examples and non-examples. In this case, I gave the definition of a linear equation to the students. Then, I gave them examples of a linear equation and a few non-examples. Next, I asked the students to write on their whiteboards which of the following is a linear equation (A, B, or C above). Most of the students selected B, a few students had A and B, and one student had C.
As per the process of Checking for Understanding, I found that the students had many misconceptions that I needed to address during the lesson. When teaching an Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) lesson, we don’t tell the students the answer, or tell the student that they have the incorrect answer, we guide the students to the correct answer, or redirect their thinking, by having them analyze the attributes in the definition.
Overgeneralizations
Here are some of the misconceptions that we cleared up during this lesson:
Debriefing
It was definitely an eye opener for all the teachers when they saw how many misconceptions the students had from this one concept (which had already been taught earlier in the year). Teachers definitely recognized the importance of strategic Checking for Understanding throughout the lesson.
Some of the teachers confided that because of the Pacing Calendar they feel that they cannot spend enough time doing CFU and providing feedback, but after hearing the students’ misconceptions, they stated that they were convinced that it needed to be done.
