Off You Go!

Alongside our amazing Look-Think-Talk activities, we offer another routine: Off You Go. In Off You Go, you show students an image that represents a concept that they have seen before but one they can still deepen their understanding. This could be a number, shape, pattern, structure, or relationship. You invite them to notice this concept in the image and then you send them off to find example of that concept in their environment that they can bring back to share and discuss.

What’s truly amazing is what happens when student bring back their examples. They might take photos, bring objects, draw sketches, or make lists, but no matter how they collect their examples, the class creates a museum of the many ways the mathematical concept can look. The collections your class assembles can tell you a lot about how they are understanding the concept, and where their thinking is stretching – or needs to be.

Look at this week’s Off You Go image. Here we are inviting students to think about the many ways a rectangle can look when it is not a square. Rectangles are everywhere in the man-made world, taking on every conceivable dimension and proportion. However, if you ask students to draw a rectangle, they will almost all draw this one:

Students are repeatedly exposed to the same ways of seeing concepts (like only seeing AB patterns or equilateral triangles) and often don’t understand the diversity within that concept. When students collect rectangles, do they all look like the one above? Are there any where the height in longer than the width? Do students collect any shapes that are not rectangles? When students see a diverse collection of rectangles, you can ask as a class the most important question, What is a rectangle? Work together to use the examples to define the properties or defining features of a rectangle. This can help students move beyond the limiting ways they have seen concepts toward precision and diversity.

We designed the Off You Go routine so that it can be used in two ways. If you are teaching remotely for any part of your week, you can use this as an asynchronous activity that closes with a synchronous discussion. You can send students off for any period of time to collect examples from their home environments, building connections to the ways math can look in students’ own real lived experiences. In essence, you may have 20+ classrooms – use that diversity to your advantage to collect a wide array of examples of a concept. Students can submit photos, show their objects on camera, or use a Jamboard to write down objects they found. If you are back in-person, this kind of activity can work well as a scavenger hunt in the classroom or school, or try it as an outside walk around your school building or neighborhood. Off you go!

And we invite you to follow us on Twitter! Tweet us the fascinating ideas you students have about our activities or how you’re trying these activities in your space. We can’t wait to hear from you!

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group