The Missing Link - Workshop Sessions

Polygons & Angles

Shapes and angles are essential to the buildings where we live and work, the furnishings and decoration in those spaces, and the tools and machines that we use daily. The overall goal of these lessons is to have students discover patterns and regularities in the relations among angles and their measures — and to understand how those patterns can be helpful in using polygonal shapes to create interesting designs and useful structures.

Why This Topic Matters

In Workshop 5: Discovery, Learner Teachers ...

... conduct several imaginative explorations to investigate angle measures and their relationships in triangles, quadrilaterals and other polygons. Using drawings and tables to organize information, teachers find ways to generalize a rule for finding the sum of the interior angles in any polygon.

In Workshop 6: In Practice, Learner Teachers ...

... discuss how they taught the Polygons & Angles lessons in their classrooms. They learn to evaluate different types of scoring guides and determine how to use them most effectively for evaluating student work. Finally, small groups of teachers begin to develop new culminating projects that target specific mathematical goals and objectives.

On the following pages, we offer agendas for two different levels of professional development:

a two-hour workshop, where teachers have an opportunity to watch the program, do one lesson and briefly discuss it
a four-hour workshop, where teachers can watch the program, pause the tape after each lesson, do each lesson on their own and have extended discussions with their colleagues

If at all possible, we recommend that you make time for the longer workshop. Even if you don't have time to do all the lessons with your colleagues during the workshop, it's essential that you do them on your own between the Discovery and In Practice workshops.