Strategies to Help Deepen Understanding in Senior Math - OAME 2018

Sheri Walker and I presented this session together on Thursday at OAME 2018. Just a note for non-Canadians reading this - we consider grades 9 & 10 as junior courses in secondary schools and grades 11 & 12 as senior courses in secondary school. So the focus of the session was on activities and questions that we would ask mostly in grade 11 Functions, grade 12 Advanced Functions and grade 12 Calculus & Vectors.

We started with this activity on domain and range using Desmos. It was originally created by Suzanne von Oy with subsequent edits by Cathy Yenca, Sheri and myself. We alluded to a list of other activities which are in the table below.

To check for understanding / for review:	To introduce a new topic:
Exponential Card Sort	Domain & Range
Which Form (quadratics)	Increasing & Decreasing
Rational Functions	Sinusoidal Transformations (radians)
Functions Card Sort
Parabola Slalom
Calculus - Day 1
Log Transformations

The second half of the session was centered around good questions that require our students to think and make connections. We created random groups of 3 and had each group work on the following two questions.

Question 1:

Extension: What if the last number must be a 9?

This came from Open Middle and was created by Kevin Rees.

Question 2:

Sheri came up with this question and we chose it because we loved the various ways that it could be started.

We also created a handout with a few more interesting questions. You can find that here.

There isn't a whole lot on them, but here are our slides. It was fantastic to have such great participation during the session - wish we could have kept going longer!