Course Guide - USAID Teacher Education Project

Students may also need to refresh their memory of how to set up a first quadrantgraph, label the graph, label the axes, and plot points. This will be one of the timesthat the instructor will use the pedagogical strategy of whole class demonstration,having students co-create a table of values (T-chart) and coordinate graph.Session 2 continues with the idea of how multiple representations of the samealgebraic situation need to be recorded. After having explored a discrete graph in theprior session, the students will now work with continuous graphs where a function iscontinuous.The session will begin with students looking at two graphs on the handout “GraphStories” and then asking them what they think these graphs mean. How are theydifferent from discrete graphs? Both of the graphs on the handout involve the ideathat time is continuous, but that change over time is continuous only for a specificinterval. The session will then move on to look at a graph of a linear function.Session 3 will address the concept of equivalence by using the classic problem,"Tiling the Pool." The focus here will be to integrate a narrative, drawing, table ofvalues on a T-chart, and a coordinate graph with the goal of discovering a symbolicrepresentation for a pattern rule. Students will work in pairs to come up with ageneralized function to describe iterations on the visual representation, again thinkingof how to extend a growth pattern, but this time by a function rule, not by a countingmethod. Note that there are multiple equivalent expressions as solution to thisproblem. (My pre-algebra students have discovered 10 equivalent expressions!)