Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Fall 2012
Grade level:
Subject area:
Lesson content:
I. Setting the Stage: What are your measureable objectives and assessment?
A. Content and Skills: What do you know about what you are planning to
teach?
The lesson focuses on the relationship between position, velocity, and acceleration and how they relate
to the derivative of a function. Students know how to differentiate polynomials function and can use the
derivative to look for local extrema. During the academic week prior to this lesson, the class focused on
modelling and optimization problems.
B. Rationale: Why teach the lesson?
Much of the class will be going on to math and physics-intensive majors in college, such as
engineering.
Name:
Grade level:
Subject area:
Lesson Content:
V. Sequence of Teaching-Procedures
A. Beginning of the Lesson: How will you immediately engage all of your
students in the content?
Students will arrive, log on to their individual laptops, and complete a warm-up problem while they
load the proper webpage. (~5 min)
B. Middle of Lesson: What are your students doing (e.g., speaking, writing,
drawing, performing, documenting, observing) to explore the content?
Follow the link to the Position, Velocity, Acceleration! Desmos Activity.
Students will be asked to make and record observations about the movement of an object
(animated on their computer screens) along a straight line. They will then be asked to connect
their observations to the features of the position function for the object. (~5-10 min.)
Students will then be asked to bring in their prior knowledge about using calculus to analyze
function to move from an estimate to an exact value. They will then connect this idea in
context. Specifically, they will be asked to connect the idea of a change in position (therefore
the derivative) to the velocity function. (~10 min.)
Students will continue to answer prompts which encourage them to make connections
between position, velocity, acceleration functions of an object. (~10-15 min.)
C. Extension and Enrichment Activities during Class Time: How will you
extend the learning of students who finish tasks early?
If students finish all prompts before the end of the class, they will begin answering from a further
set of practice questions on rectilinear motion using differential calculus.
D. End of Lesson: How will you help all students process the experience?
This is largely a discussion and analysis based lesson plan, so there are many stopping points for
students to process what they are learning. The lesson is also paced to build on itself, so that each
new step follows from group processing and discussion of new knowledge.
VI. Reflection after Teaching: What did you learn from teaching the lesson?
B. Looking at Teaching
o Prompting questions include (you should answer most of these):
o What went well?
o What were the challenges?
o What did you learn (about yourself, students, and content) from doing the lesson?
o What would you do differently?