Example One
The first adjustment I made to my lesson plan was on day three I noticed although three of my brightest students understood the process of dividing polynomials, the rest of the class was still feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work applying long division required.
I did not want those three students to breeze by assignment and become bored when they had completed the worksheet. To avoid this, I created a second handout for day 5 with a different ID, for the handout titled “Practice practice!” there was handout ID:1 and ID:2. The difference being ID:2 took some additional steps that were not yet required in ID:1. They had to check if there was any missing variable as well as write the polynomial in standard form before performing long division.
The three students that understood the process of long division when the polynomial provided was in standard form and skipped no variables were given the choice to take handout with ID:2. They were notified that there was a small difference and extra steps in the new handout and were asked if they would like to attempt to figure out what the difference was …show more content…
They worded their questions carefully to ensure I became aware of how they got to the step in which they were unsure of how to proceed. “If the first term in my dividend is negative but the number out here (term in divisor) is not negative then my term in the quotient will be negative, right?” is an example of the types of questions I heard. I was taken aback by the fact that their questions became so specific and they used words I had previously used when teaching that they had not previously used during their