Katherine Chanler

Lesson 2 Reflection
November 9th, 2016

This lesson felt like one of my most successful I have ever taught. In part because I
started with an activity called Notice, Wonder that I had practiced on my cohort during one of
our classes, and in part because I found a challenging, but accessible math task for students to
work on. The image that I used for the Notice, Wonder was very engaging and it created a good
hook for students to warm up their mathematical thinking. Rather than focusing the lesson on a
specific mathematical operation or procedure the aim of this lesson was to practice positive math
norms that we can use to help us solve problems.
The math norms that the Notice, Wonder activity practices are the math norms of making
observations and asking questions. I presented the students with a sort of math puzzle that in
order to solve, students must make observations and ask questions. I also created a Notice,
Wonder worksheet to go along with the problem. Rather than being a I do, we do, you do type
of math lesson, this lesson is based around the problem solving. So the majority of the lesson
time is for students working on the problem, instead of mostly sitting and listening to the teacher.
I circulated the classroom after students were paired off and noticed that everyone was
eager to jump in to solving the unknown variables presented in the problem. Many students were
talking to each other and beginning to write down guesses for each variable. Next time, I would
like to give more clear instructions to point students to the problem worksheet that asks students
to write down things they notice and wonder about the problem before beginning to guess and

check since many students barely used the worksheet if at all. I had to follow up with each group
asking them to try recording their observations and questions, sometimes interrupting their
thinking. This would not have been necessary if I had set clearer expectations for the activity at
the onset.
The follow up discussion was also very good. Through students sharing what they
noticed about the problem, students were able to explain their reasoning. In the future, I would
like to re-emphasize the importance of the math norms that we practiced during the two activities
at the end of the lesson and ask students to think about how we make sense of math by being
active thinkers, by looking closely, asking questions, going back and asking if our answers make
sense. In the end I would like students to take away that doing math is not a passive process of
following memorized steps, but like in reading, it is about actively making meaning.
Overall this lesson was a good experience that proved to me as a teacher that I can
present challenging math tasks to my students before teaching them exactly how to solve it and
students will in fact be more engaged with the math because they are actively trying to solve it.
Also this lesson taught me how to seek out and use math materials that are created by experts in
the field and adapt or scaffold them to my class. I would never have been able to come up with
this problem on my own, but I was successfully able to use it in the classroom.