The Longitude Lesson

Welcome to the Longitude Lesson!

Representations of a problem-based lesson where students investigate the mathematical idea of global coordinates through the historical context of the navigational challenges faced by Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic exploration. The lesson helps them use proportional reasoning to relate quantities such as time, rate, and distance.

This collection features two storyboards, each representing a version of the lesson developed by groups of teachers participating in StoryCircles—a collaborative process in which teachers design, share, and refine lessons together. Each storyboard illustrates how the Longitude Lesson might unfold in practice. Rather than serving as prescriptive teaching scripts, these storyboards are intended as resources that help teachers explore the instructional possibilities the problem offers and consider the range of decisions a teacher might make along the way. Specifically, you will have the opportunity to review the Edwards Family, which consists of a collection of two artifacts:

• The first version, called Alan Edwards, was developed by educators from the state of New York to represent a lesson they themselves designed and implemented in the context of an 11th pre-calculus course.
• The second version, called Beau Edwards, was developed by a team of mathematics educators from the University of Michigan to help envision how that lesson could play out in ways different than it had in the school in New York.

You will have the opportunity to reflect on these lesson representations by adding annotations, reviewing annotations contributed by other teachers, and starting a discussion thread. 

Audience:

Highschool Mathematics Teachers, Teacher Educators, Students

Mathematics Domain:

Geometry

Key Features:

• View storyboards
• Annotate storyboards
• Read annotations from teachers around the world
• Compare annotations
• Start lesson focused discussion threads

Learning Objectives

• Examine two different representations of the Longitude lesson and discover different ways to teach this topic
• Refine your knowledge on teaching approaches by understanding different perspectives
• Initiate discussions with teachers on teaching approaches

Tags:

Sponsors:

National Science Foundation, James S. McDonnell Foundation