What piece of information has Danny forgotten to use? What is the purpose of Lydia’s graph? What is the point of figuring out the slope and intercept?
Such questions appeared to make the purpose more discernable to teachers. Feedback from the US observers to these changes was encouraging:
I think the questions or prompts about each piece of student work really focus the students on the thinking, bring out the key mathematics and are a great improvement to the original lesson…Last year students just made judgment statements, but this year the comments were focused on the mathematics.
Not all teachers shared this view, however. In the UK, one teacher commented:
Students are being forced along a certain path as a way to engage with the sample student work. Rather, they [the questions] should be more open and students are then able to comment in any way they like. …. I think sometimes they feel themselves kind of shoehorning in certain types of answer.
This teacher preferred to simply ask students to explain the approach; describe what the student had done well and suggest possible improvements. This practice did encourage engagement, and students’ assessment criteria were made visible to the teacher, but at times the learning goals of the lesson were only superficially attended to.