First Time teaching a curriculum Thinking Classroom task
by Amy Bowker
April 12, 2021
Today was the first time I really used a real curriculum-based question for my students to struggle with a learn from. The learning prompt was that Toblerone was redesigning their box and needed to know the Surface Area of their box.
Before I let my students go into their breakout rooms, we discussed that we have only been learning about surface area so far for 2D items. I told them that this Toblerone Bar was a 3D item and the students discussed that it meant it meant several different sides.
I put my students into breakout rooms and told them to log onto a jamboard link and keep on the slide number of their breakout room. Since I teach virtually I am putting 4-5 students in each breakout room although a majority of my students refuse to talk online it is a struggle.
Most of the groups immediately could calculate that the long side of the Toblerone bar was 20 x 3=60 but from there on, they got confused.
Day 2: We continued with the same questions but I got them to restart on new jamboards and with new groups. Again each group was able to determine that 20×3=60 for one of the sides and then realizes that they needed to times 60 x3 because a triangle has 3 sides. We talked about if they knew the area of the rectangles was 180, what other parts of the boxes were missing?
This was a HUGE puzzle to figure out what to say to which group just to push them forward a bit but not give them the answer. It was difficult to jump room to room with keeping tabs on who was doing what but I’m sure I will get used to that in time. Next time I would have an interactive Triangular Prism for them to mark up or view. I’m going to review what to do for consolidation because a lot of the jamboards my students completed were incomplete and didn’t make sense so I wasn’t sure what to do. And next time, I will complete the problems in advance so that way I can remember how to give them little steps to guide them in the right direction.
The learning that I saw and heard from my students was amazing. They were learning to communicate with math and it was incredible to see their perseverance. I will definitely continue to use the Thinking Classroom format in the future.
