The Joy of Having Students Redirect the Class

On Thursday I walked into Alg 2 class ready to review and practice for an assessment on learning  targets related to graphing parabolas and transforming the graphs. I didn't have any earth-shakingly original ideas but with all the snow day and President's day weekend disruptions I figured there would be plenty to practice and review.

But my student's had a better idea! One student had a bag full of M&Ms and offered me some stating his mom had given them to him because it was his birthday. I congratulated him on his birthday and before I could say more, another student piped up "Miss Morrison, can we make Happy Birthday signs for Josh using Desmos and what we've learned about graphing??"

I was immediately in love with the idea! Here was a hands-on way to practice our graphing and transforming graphs skills (like I planned) that it was student initiated and motivated (they all were begging me at this point).

So the next 88 minutes were spent creating masterpieces on Desmos. They were trading tips, referring to the rules for transformation they learned, asking lots of questions and constantly engaged in peer feedback, collaboration and teaching. They couldn't believe class time was up when the alarm sounded and were sad that they had to move on to the next class. I was in love with the culture of learning they had just created in spite of me!

Here are some samples:

This was my fastest finisher who spent the rest of the block helping his classmates.

This is not finished yet but for a student who struggles to become engaged was outstanding effort.

This was the birthday boy's- having come from another school situation where he already completed an Alg 2 course, it was great to see him applying concepts he had learned there but was fuzzy on and asking lots of other questions.