You can find the week 5 Reflection form here. The prompts (taken from the CCSS Standards for Mathematical Practice) handed out in Thursday’s Wrap were:
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively: Students work to make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations. They improve their ability to bring two complementary abilities to bear on problems involving quantitative relationships. One is the ability to decontextualize – to abstract a given situation and represent it symbolically and manipulate the representing symbols as if they have a life of their own, without necessarily attending to those concrete or abstract objects that the symbols refer to. The other is the ability to contextualize, to pause as needed during the manipulation process in order to probe into the meaning of the symbols and operations involved. Quantitative reasoning entails habits of: creating a coherent representation of the problem at hand; considering the units involved; attending to the meaning of quantities, not just how to compute them; and knowing and flexibly using different properties of operations and objects.
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them: Students work to explain to themselves the meanings of problems and look for entry points to their solutions. They analyze givens, constraints, relationships, and goals. They make conjectures about the form and meaning of the solution and plan a solution pathway rather than simply jumping into a solution attempt. They consider analogous problems, and try special cases and simpler forms of the original problem in order to gain insight into its solution. They monitor and evaluate their progress and change course if necessary. They can use concrete objects or pictures as well as abstractions and analogies to make sense of a problem and to start developing an approach to solving it. They can explain correspondences between equations, verbal descriptions, tables, and graphs or draw diagrams of important features and relationships, graph data, and search for regularity or trends. They check their answers to problems using a different method, and they continually ask themselves, “Does this make sense?” They can understand the approaches of others to solving complex problems and identify correspondences between different approaches.