Maths Teaching Idea #1
I will try to write short posts on teaching ideas that I have used and/or have thought of recently. I will try to post things that I have used to allow me to reflect on strengths and limitations as well as the ideas itself.
I was teaching quadratic sequences recently. This was just after a homework on substituting into the nth term in order to generate elements of the Fibonacci Sequence. One of the strengths of the homework is that students knew what answers they were meant to be getting. This means that students are confident to move on but also places greater emphasis on the need for detailed working.
I adapted this idea when the students were working on finding the nth term of quadratic sequences. When we had spoke about methods for finding the values of a,b,c in T(n) = an²+bn+c:
- students were asked to choose values of a, b and c between -5 and 5.
- With their formulae I asked them to work out the first 5 terms of the sequence.
- They then used their sequence to find the nth term.
Because their final answer was also their starting point students gained confidence with the method. The task was inherently self-checking which gave me the space to speak to students who weren’t getting back to their nth term.
To fade the support of knowing the nth term, students were then asked to share two of their sequences with a partner so that they had a sense of finding the nth term without knowing the answer before starting.
This strategy can be extended to a range of contexts and removes part of the preparation time for the teacher. Possible extensions are for students to use fractions and decimals for a,b,c or to extend the method to cubic sequences.
