Trig Review

I begin this review by asking my students to reflect for two minutes without talking about the concepts we’ve studied in this unit.  I tell them they should be particularly mindful of those lessons they struggled with.  Reflecting for two minutes is actually much longer than it sounds…try it with your students!  After two minutes, I ask my students to write a word or brief phrase on the board describing the lesson they had the most difficulty with, but not to duplicate anyone else’s posting.  When everyone has had an opportunity to post to the front board, I summarize the topics into five or six categories.  You can see photos of my whiteboard before and after the summaries.  I tell my students that they will be helping each other review and will each get a chance to work on each category before the end of class. 

You will want to have copies of the topics handout and make sure students bring their graphing calculators to class. I also keep an assortment of graphic organizers available for my students to use as they choose.  I’ve included copies in the resources section of this lesson if you want to use them.  I begin this part of the lesson by having my students number off one through six.  I ask them to group their desks in sets of three “around the clock”.  See “Rotating Review” in my strategies folder.  I assign one student number to each set of desks and have students seat themselves according to their number then assign one topic to each group.  As we move through the review, these groups of three will continue to mix it up until everyone has had an opportunity to work with each topic.  I give each team copies of the handout and tell them to complete the section for their topic. (MP2, MP6) I can usually anticipate pretty closely what areas they’ll need/want to work on, but this is flexible enough to allow students to tailor the review to their needs.   As my students begin working, I walk around answering questions, making notes of areas of misunderstanding, and encouraging them to help each other.  I allow approximately seven minutes for each review session then have the students rotate as indicated earlier. 

There is a video narrative that accompanies this section, explaining some of the pedagogy.  As we finish the final rotation, I ask my students to be thinking of one thing they feel more comfortable about and one thing they still have questions about. (MP2) I hand out notecards to write their questions on, collect them, and spend the remaining time discussing those questions.  I remind my students as class ends that they will need their calculator for the exam and that it will be an independent activity, rather than a team assessment.  Since I use both team and independent assessments, I let my students know in advance which they’ll be facing.