NOTICE Lab - Video Club 1: Flag Hoist

Video Club 1: Flag Hoist

In this lesson, a class decides whether a selection of graphs could be a realistic depiction of a boy hoisting a flag (see the task below). Students offer different explanations for why a graph may/may not be realistic. Students use both personal experience and gesture as part of their reasoning.

Video Club Overview

Video Club Goals:

- Teachers will attend to and reason about students’ ideas related to height, rate, and time.
- Teachers will attend to and reason about how students connect the graphs to the real-life situation of hoisting a flag (connecting representations).
- Teachers will attend to and reason about students’ multiple modes of expressing their ideas.

Materials:

- Video loaded on Anotemos and shared with all participants
- If watching in person, each participant should have a device on which they can view the video and headphones.

Get ready (20 mins). To prepare participants for viewing the video, review the problem. Give participants a few minutes to reason about the problem themselves. Then have a whole group discussion that gives participants the opportunity to share their explanations. The problem:

Exploring the Math

Exploring the properties of the graphs:

Slope/Rate of Change- One of the ways that the graphs tell a story is through their slopes. Notice that Graph A has a constant slope, indicating that the flag goes up in one, fluid motion. Graph C, on the other hand, appears to flatten at regular intervals, indicating that the boy pauses as he hoists the flag. The change in slopes in B, D, and E indicate the flag speeding up and slowing down at different times, based on change in the steepness of the slope.

Units and time- There are no units on the graphs, which makes the time open to interpretation. The time could be in seconds, minutes, hours, etc. The units could make a difference, particularly when discussing Graph F. Is it possible for Graph F to occur if the units of time were seconds? What about if it were hours? Days?

Position/height- Again, this property of the graph becomes particularly important when examining Graph F. Is it possible for the flag to be at multiple heights at the same time? What would Graph F mean for the height of the flag? What does an individual point on the graph mean?

Connecting to Algebra

This problem is a good example of how a graph can tell a story, and how the different properties of the graph contribute to that story. While students reason about this problem, they think about how the covariation between height and time represent the flag’s motion. While determining the story that each graph tells, students also must justify their responses using the properties of the graphs. They also have to use the information from each graph to make judgments about which graphs are realistic and which are not. In other words, they must connect the graphical representation to the real-life motion of hoisting a flag.

Viewing and Discussing the Video

Have participants watch the 6:26 video clip individually on the Anotemos platform. Participants should be encouraged to tag and comment on the video when they see interesting moments of student thinking.

Discussion: In discussing the video, focus on how students both verbally and through gesture make sense of the stories of motion that the graphs tell. For instance, how do they relate their ideas of height, time, and slope to what they think each graph depicts? Another area of focus could be how students relate their own experience to the graphs. How do students describe the possibilities for hoisting a flag and how do they relate those possibilities to the graphs?

Description of Goal:

Teachers will attend to and reason about students’ ideas related to height, rate, and time.
Teachers will attend to and reason about how students connect the graphs to the real-life situation of hoisting a flag (connecting representations).
Teachers will attend to and reason about students’ multiple modes of expressing their ideas.

Table - Video Key Moments

Untitled document

Potential Discussion Questions:

What are students’ ideas related to the vertical graph? How do they use slope, height or time to justify their ideas?
In what ways do the students relate the scenario to their own experiences?
How does gesture play a role in students’ justifications? What different kinds of things are students gesturing?

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