Session Title: Let's Sketch Diagrams to Solve Word Problems!

Speaker: Fawn Nguyen

This is our first of three webinars in ICTM's 2023-2024 webinar series: Building a Thinking State through Mathematical Tasks. This year, all of the speakers will be focusing on the topic of Choosing Good Tasks for a Thinking Classroom. 

5:00 - 6:30 MST 

4:00 - 5:30 PST

Session Description: In this session, you'll be asked to resist the urge to write equations to solve problems and be challenged to create meaningful diagrams that show understanding of the problem and experience how a good diagram can reveal an elegant solution. Word problems and writing equations [to solve them] are two things that students find difficult, so much so that they have a hard time just starting the problem. Learning to represent the problem via diagrams is a way to pause and think deeply about the scenario and its context.

Fawn’s bio:  Fawn is on the Math Advance Team at Amplify Desmos Math. She was a math coach for a K-8 school district for three years. Before that, Fawn was a middle school teacher for 30 years.  Fawn blogs about her lessons and classroom teaching at fawnnguyen.com. She also authors three other websites for teachers: visualpatterns.org, between2numbers.com, and chewablemath.com.