Academic Literacy: Visual
As we display posters for our students to reflect and build upon, we also need to display their work. Encouraging students to create visuals allows them to think about how they themselves learned the content. Asking students, "What helped you to understand?", "How can you help others understand?", "What are the main ideas?", are great ways to get them to think about how they can present their new knowledge to others.
Students can make visuals for virtually any topic, but topics that lend nicely usually have a dense amount of vocabulary, complex equations/formulas that need to be memorized, or multi-step processes.
One example of a great use of visuals is having students make a booklet in which each page details one method to solve quadratic equations. We know there are several methods (completing the square, quadratic formula, factoring, graphing, square roots, inspection) that students could choose to solve quadratics. When students detail in a booklet each method and when/why they would choose one method over the other, they are challenged to use metacognition in addition to knowing the content.
Students can also create posters to be hung in the classroom as reminders of complex equations or processes. Students could create video tutorials to show a "sick classmate" how to solve a problem they learned in class, or they could create a blog detailing their thinking through class problems and share their knowledge with the world.
Asking students to become creative with their mathematical knowledge challenges them to think of mathematics less as a set of rigid, black and white rules, and more of an art form that can be expressed and represented in many different ways.
Students can make visuals for virtually any topic, but topics that lend nicely usually have a dense amount of vocabulary, complex equations/formulas that need to be memorized, or multi-step processes.
One example of a great use of visuals is having students make a booklet in which each page details one method to solve quadratic equations. We know there are several methods (completing the square, quadratic formula, factoring, graphing, square roots, inspection) that students could choose to solve quadratics. When students detail in a booklet each method and when/why they would choose one method over the other, they are challenged to use metacognition in addition to knowing the content.
Students can also create posters to be hung in the classroom as reminders of complex equations or processes. Students could create video tutorials to show a "sick classmate" how to solve a problem they learned in class, or they could create a blog detailing their thinking through class problems and share their knowledge with the world.
Asking students to become creative with their mathematical knowledge challenges them to think of mathematics less as a set of rigid, black and white rules, and more of an art form that can be expressed and represented in many different ways.
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