It is important to “launch” students into the work as quickly as efficiently as possible.  The longer it takes for students to get to work on the task the less thinking they will do.  We want to use the application problem as an opportunity for students to use their prior knowledge and have their various ideas validated. We can use these various approaches to highlight mathematical connections.

Pre-Work:

• Read the Eureka Lesson overview to understand the purpose of the lesson.
• Read the application problem and do it out yourself.

• Identify as many possible solutions as you can.
• Identify the mathematical connections between different representations.
• Create a potential sequence of solutions that you would share with the class.

• Identify a location in the room to launch.

Process:

1. Gather students in a location in the room, standing if possible, to launch the task. Try to use different locations daily.
2. Explain the problem in a story or context verbally. Only write down essential details such as quantities, measurements, data, labels, etc.
3. Send students to work on the task quickly (the launch should only take 3-5 minutes). NOTE: This is not a time for direct teaching or frontloading of strategies or models.
4. Provide students 3-5 minutes to visualize and solve the task on their whiteboards.

1. Walk around the room, noting the representations that are appearing in the work.
2. Select possible students  whose work you could share with the class.

1. “Would you be okay if I borrow your whiteboard?”

3. Solidify the sequence with which you will show solutions (2-3).

5. Show the sequence of solutions to students either by holding up the work or by using a document camera.

1. “Look at this person’s work. See if you can figure out what they did to represent the problem.”

1. NOTE: We are not doing a show-and-tell here. We want the students to be looking at each other’s work and having to make meaning from something that they didn’t write. This places them as active participants rather than passive.
2. Consider using turn-and-talk to see how people are parsing the work that they see.

2. For subsequent solutions, “What did this person do? What is the same as the previous ones? What is different about this one?”

1. This is where you will have to utilize your knowledge of the mathematical connections to support and guide the discussion.

Additional Considerations:

When considering the sequencing of the solutions, there are a few ways to go about it. You can always consider moving from Concrete → Representational → Abstract examples. You can start with an example that was most commonly used by the class and then provide some alternative solutions to identify commonalities and differences. You can move towards something that you are going to focus on in the lesson – a particular representation or method that you want to highlight. This allows you to use the application problem as a transition into the concept development.