A Video Club Curriculum for Teachers

Overview

This video club curriculum was designed around two foci: supporting teachers to notice seeds of algebraic thinking and helping teachers notice multimodal thinking. Attention to these goals is scaffolded throughout. We support teachers in taking up the Algebraic Seeds Framework (ASF) by beginning with less formal settings, which we have found makes it easier for teachers to initially identify seeds and notice student thinking through a seeds lens from pilot data. We support teachers in noticing multimodal student thinking by including videos where gesture and other modalities are important, including a video where students are mostly speaking Spanish (which we do not expect most teachers to speak), and by introducing the draw tool, which is particularly helpful for marking gestures in video, in Video Club 4 for use there and beyond.

Video Club 1: Flag Hoist

A traditional video club conducted with the Anotemos video annotation tool.

Video Description

In this video, a class discusses the graph of a flag being raised up a pole. This video takes place in a traditional classroom setting. Teachers may notice students’ verbal reasoning as well as the gestures they use to think through the situation.

Purpose

Video Club 2: Rat-a-tat Cat

Introduce teachers to seeds. In the video club, focus teacher attention on student ideas and where they come from.

Video Description

In this video, a group of children play a card game. This is an informal setting for mathematics, so teachers may need to be encouraged to think creatively about where mathematical and algebraic ideas are present in this game and in how the children play.

Purpose

Video Club 3: Flag Area

Reinforce the seeds framework and apply it to a more formal setting. In this video club, seeds don’t need to be asked about explicitly; hopefully, teachers will consider this perspective again from their learning in the last video club, and this is a chance to practice.

Video Description

Students work on a task involving splitting up an area into various fractions using different shapes. Much of the dialogue is in Spanish, which may encourage teachers to use clues from non-verbal modalities such as gesture. This video takes place in an interview setting.

Purpose

Video Club 4: Mangoes

Introduce teachers to the draw tool in Anotemos. This provides a good opportunity to talk about the importance of gesture (and more broadly multimodal expressions of thinking). 

Video Description

A small group of students discusses the mangoes problem, which asks students to walk backwards through a series of fraction operations: “After ⅙, ⅕, ¼, ⅓, and finally ½ of the mangoes have been taken, the bowl has three mangoes remaining. How many were there at the beginning?” The setting of this video resembles a traditional classroom setting.

Purpose

Video Club 5: Lemonade

The final two video clubs serve as additional practice with noticing using the seeds framework and attending to multimodal expression. 

Video Description

A student works through a mathematical task on the ratios of lemons to water needed to make different amounts of lemonade with an interviewer. This is not a traditional classroom setting, but the task may be familiar to teachers as it resembles school mathematics. 

Purpose

Video Club 6: Root Graph

The final two video clubs serve as additional practice with noticing using the seeds framework and attending to multimodal expression. 

Video Description

A class discusses if a square root graph can ever have negative inputs and what that might look like if it does. This video takes place in a traditional classroom setting.

Purpose