It’s the second day of my class, and it’s going…OK. It’s a new class, and it made sense to do some review activities so I rolled out the OUR curriculum and tried one of their lessons. Specifically lesson three of their 8th grade linear unit. We had a number talk, which I updated a little bit to this:

The number talk went ok. Good actually, I considering it was my second one ever. There were definitely some kids who rolled their eyes at the beginning, who were engrossed by the end. There were also kids engrossed from the beginning, that felt defeated by the end. I think I need to do better work at making strategies visible and accessible, but that’s another post.

After that we started the task. Immediately it felt like there was no time left. We were either going to finish the second part of the task, and have to end the class their since our school had shorter periods to make room for our thanksgiving potluck. The kids energy and affect seemed low, so I thought more problems would make kids loathe today and want to cut my end-of-the-day class tomorrow. So, I asked the class, “Hey, would you guys rather do the back of the worksheet, or do an activity? Let’s have a vote.” To my surprise, the info gap won, 3-2.

An info gap is an activity where students are given either a data card and a problem card. The problem card person has to work with the data card person to get the task finished. This task turned into more of a pair exploration because I didn’t explain that the data card person is supposed to be a tough guy, but that was ok. The info gap we worked on had an unfinished graph and on the problem card, and a table with a couple of values on it. The students with the graph knew they needed the data from the data card, and they asked the questions to get that information. The students with the tables though they had a task of their own, to make set of larger points out of the small set of points they were given. They were each working on making a representation of the same linear relationship, but they had different tasks. This allowed them to genuinely help each other, without merely copying. Is this what was supposed to happen? I don’t know, but I do know we are doing some more info gaps before this cycle is over.