Monthly Archives: February 2018

Last year I used the process of Claim-Evidence-Reasoning, or CER, to teach statistics. I wrote about it a lot. I mean a lot. Seriously. More than I’ve written about anything else. (two more posts here & here.) But that was about teaching statistics. This term I have a geometry class and as my students were struggling with a proof, I had an “aha!” moment. Why not use the claim-evidence-reasoning process?

We were trying to prove why the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees. Here’s what I gave them to start with.

That’s right. I just gave them a triangle. The traditional way to approach this proof is to draw a line through point C so that it’s parallel to side AB. And I did include that on the back, in case kids got stuck. But here’s the interesting thing – faced with just the triangle and a background of transformational geometry, they began rotating this triangle to tessellate a line of three triangles. It looked like this:

Then I asked kids to think about this approach, talk about it with each other, and then write a proof for why the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees.

I collected what everyone had written and, like before, transcribed it for students to analyze for evidence and reasoning. Then we reviewed as a class to try to sort out the evidence (highlighted in cyan) from the reasoning (highlighted in orange). From there, I was able to give them another try with some direction from our conversation about evidence and reasoning. This was more successful. I pulled 4 examples to share with the class – I could have easily shared twice that number, which was more than half of the papers that I received from the class of 22. Here’s one of the 4 examples:

Unfortunately, what you can’t seen in this scan is how the individual statements are numbered. Thinking doesn’t always come in deductive order. Sometimes you just have to write down what you know and why you know it. Then you can go back and organize it. It’s like making a rough draft of the proof.

Today, as we were reviewing these exemplars, I asked my students how often they wrote rough drafts for their humanities essays (all the time) or how often they wrote rough drafts of their science CER (claim-evidence-reasoning) papers (all the time). So, it shouldn’t be surprising that a rough draft might be in order for a geometry proof.

In this fourth entry about using structure to teach algebra, I’d like to focus on how we moved our kids from the picture-based systems to using traditional symbols. We focused on systems of two equations because even though they could solve systems involving more than two equations using emojis and mobiles, moving to traditional symbols could be more intense.

We began with systems that could have been represented by mobiles.

Many students even drew their own mobiles using x’s and y’s. Others went right to the equation 2x + 5y = 4x + 2y and came up with 3y = 2x. Again, they used this relationship as a direct substitution. Some substituted into the top equation to get 3y + 5y = 48, while others transformed the bottom equation into 6y + 2y = 48. Once they were able to solve for y, they were able to solve for x.

But we didn’t just want systems that immediately transformed into mobiles, so we also gave them ones like this:

We were quite curious about what they would do with this kind of system. Our instinct and experience would be to solve the bottom equation for y, but that’s not what the kids did. They added 3 to both sides of the bottom equation so that both equations were equal to 22. This left them with the equation 2x + 3y = 3x + y + 3, or 2y = x + 3. There’s no direct substitution here, though, so kids needed to reason further. Some used y = 0.5x + 1.5 while others said that x = 2y – 3, which led them to 2x = 4y – 6. Again, they did this on their own, without any direct teaching from us.

We also gave them systems like this one, which seemed pretty obvious to us:

Just about every student was able to come up with the equation 3x – 2 = 4x + 1, but lots of kids weren’t sure what to do next because the equation didn’t contain x & y. Those students needed a bit of prompting until they realized that they could use that equation to solve for x.

And then there was this one:

It doesn’t look all that different from the others. Most students added 24 to the bottom equation and proceeded as above. But I had one student who decided to multiply the bottom equation by -5. What?! When I asked him why he decided to multiply, he said that he wanted to make the bottom equation equal 20 and multiplying by -5 would do that. Fair enough.

The entire journey, from emoji’s to mobiles to traditional symbols took us to a completely different substitution method for solving systems. Had we not been open to following our students’ lead, we never would have learned these ideas that were completely intuitive to them. Remember, these weren’t “honors” kids, but they were willing to try, to think, and to take risks. And we gave them the space and time to play with the ideas.