What would it look like if

we designed schools to be
places where teachers learned,
alongside their students?
—Dr. Elham Kazemi

222 THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

Reflective Teaching
A Focus on Student Thinking in Problem-Solving

I
f there is one mantra that has stuck with us when it comes to
improving our math instruction, it is “make a small change, reflect,
and do it again.” In their article, “Math Tasks as a Framework for
Reflection: From Research to Practice,” Mary K. Stein and Margaret
Schwan Smith cite the NCTM Professional Standards for Teaching
Mathematics which argue that a primary factor in the professional
growth of teachers is the opportunity teachers have to “reflect on Make a
learning and teaching individually and with colleagues.” They go on
to say that whereas all teachers informally think about what happens small change,
in their classrooms, “cultivating a habit of systematic and deliberate
reflection may hold the key to improving one’s teaching as well as to
reflect, and
sustaining lifelong professional development.” do it again.
But what should teachers reflect on? There is no right answer to that
question, but we’d like to share some work we’ve been doing to support
teacher reflection, focusing on student mathematical thinking on
nonroutine math problems.

Below you will find three sets of questions focusing on three important
aspects of your teaching—planning, student work, and reflection/
revision. The goal of these questions is to help you learn from your
experience and from the experience of your students. I recently heard an
inspiring question from Dr. Elham Kazemi, professor of mathematics Dr. Kazemi has developed a
education and associate dean for professional learning at the University great observation technique
of Washington—“What would it look like if we designed schools to be called “teacher time out.”
places where teachers learned, alongside their students?” We offer the To learn more, visit http://www.
shadowmathcon.com/elham-
process detailed below as a beginning. Even if you only have time to
kazemi/
answer a few questions from each section, or if you only do this formally
once a year, we hope the experience will be rewarding.

You are a scientist looking into learning. The planning phase is your
problem-posing and hypothesizing. The teaching is the experiment, and
the student work is the data collection and observation. The reflection is
the conclusion and may lead to a revised hypothesis and a new “teaching
experiment.”

One final suggestion…Consider doing this with at least one other

teacher. You can do a problem together and then work together on the
Planning Questions. Then each of you tries the problem with their
students. You can meet again and discuss what you learned from your
students’ reasoning. These questions can help structure any follow-up
conversations.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 223

 Instructions
1 Find or create an open-ended, challenging math problem that
meets the criteria proposed in the introduction to the math section.

2 Complete the Planning Questions below, before doing the

problem with your class.

3 Try the problem with your students.

4 Collect samples of student work.
5 Choose some samples of student work and complete
Questions on Student Work.

6 Complete the Reflection/Revision Questions.

PLANNING QUESTIONS
We start with a quality math problem and try to solve it in as many
ways as possible. Once we have had our own problem-solving experience
with the problem, we can be explicit about the content/strategies we
want students to learn. Then we start to think about how to engage
students. We can begin to imagine how students might approach the
problem. We can also start to identify potential student struggles and
plan for them beforehand. One of our goals is to allow students to
experience productive struggle and that requires some preparation.
It can be hard to come up with questions to support struggling students
and extensions to challenge faster learners if we have to do it in the
moment. Certainly, we are always going to have to do some thinking on
our feet, but the better prepared we are, the more strategic we can be.

1 Describe how you solved the problem.

2 Can you think of any other ways to solve the problem?

3 Why did you choose this problem? What do you like about it?

4 Why do you think this is a DOK 3 problem?

5 What do you want students to get from working on this problem?

6 Identify and describe a few specific challenges you think students

will have in solving the problem. Describe how you might help
and support the problem-solving efforts of those students without
giving too much away.

7 How could you extend this problem for students who finish?

224 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

 QUESTIONS ON STUDENT THINKING
Adult education teachers always talk about how much we learn from
our students. Many teachers say they learn more from their students
than their students learn from them. Teachers are usually referring to
all the stories and experiences our students share, or the inspiration we
derive from their decisions to come to our classes, balancing complicated
Our students
lives and responsibilities for a regular date with struggle. But there is are trying
another really important way we can learn from our students—focus on to teach us
their reasoning. We must really delve deeply into student thinking, to
understand the individuals in our class, and also to better understand
if we take the
adult education students in general and how they learn. Our students time to listen.
are trying to teach us, if we take the time to listen. If possible, consider
doing this phase with another teachers. Math teachers coming together
to analyze student thinking can be a very rich activity. Remember when
choosing work to analyze, don’t focus only on students who got the right
answer. You may learn more from student mistakes, or solution methods
that are interesting but incomplete.

Answer the following questions for each sample

of student work you choose:

1 Explain each student’s method/thinking.

2 Why did you choose this sample of student work?

What did you learn from it?

3 How typical was this student’s approach in your class?

4 Any additional comments?

REFLECTIONS/REVISION QUESTIONS
Whatever happens is an opportunity to learn something about your
students and how they learn. If something doesn’t go well, you can
learn a lot about how to do it better next time. And if things do go
well, why did they go well and how could they go better. This section
is about looking back at your predictions and comparing them to what
happened—as you observe and analyze student thinking you’ll start
to improve your sense of how they will make sense of and productively
struggle with future problems. Even if you are not going to be sharing
this with other teachers, spend some time with the last question. The
teacher you are advising might be you.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 225

 1 What did you learn from using this problem with your students
(about math, about individual students, about your class, about
student thinking in general, etc)?

2 What (if anything) would you do differently if you used this

problem again?

3 Comment on how your class (individual students, or as a whole)

may have benefited from their work on this problem.

4 Did students get what you wanted them to get from the problem?
How do you know?

5 What challenges came up for your students that you didn’t expect?

6 What strategies/solution methods/questions came out that seemed

helpful to students?

7 What advice/message do you have for a teacher who is considering

using this problem with their class?

A Call to Action
To give readers a real sense of how helpful these reflections can be, we
are including three sample write-ups, written by Tyler Holzer, a teacher
leader at a community-based organization in Brooklyn, NY. If you find
Tyler’s write-ups helpful, consider writing one yourself, using these
questions to guide you. Share those write-ups with your colleagues.
Write them with your colleagues. If you are a program manager,
consider protecting some time for your staff to work on these questions
together. We believe in teacher-led professional development of practice.
Too often, we teach in our little pocket of the egg carton, isolated from
other teachers. Let us turn our classrooms into laboratories to learn
about learning and share what we discover.

n Multiples of Nine Problem

n The Gold Rush Problem

n The Movie Theater Problem

226 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

Multiples of Nine Problem
The Problem:
Find the smallest multiple of 9 that has only
even digits. Please show all your work.

How I Solved It
I knew that none of the two-digit multiples of 9 contained only even
numbers. I also knew that any multiples of 9 that were between 100 and
199 wouldn’t work, because they all would have a 1—an odd number—
as the leading digit. I started working under the assumption that the
correct number would be somewhere in the 200s, so I picked a nice,
round number and started from there. I calculated 9 × 30 = 270. Because
this had a 7 in it, I knew that it couldn’t be the right answer, but I
noticed that if I were to add 18 to 270, I would get 288. Thus, 9 × 32 =
288 was my tentative answer.

I couldn’t commit to this answer because there might be a smaller

multiple of 9 that was located in the 200s and also had only even digits.
So I went back to 270 and began counting down by 18. I counted down
by 18 instead of 9 because the correct number has to be an even number
times 9 (so that I would have an even product). So the numbers I
checked were 9 × 28 = 252, 9 × 26 = 234, and 9 × 24 = 216. None of these
worked, so the correct answer must be 288.

Other Ways to Solve This Problem

I could just write out all the multiples of 9 and keep going until I
found one that had only even digits. This method feels a little risky
because—if I were just counting up by 9 to the next multiple rather than
multiplying each time—it would be easy to make a mistake somewhere.
Even if I were go through and multiply 9 by several numbers, it’s likely
that I would miss a number at some point.

Another way to solve this involves knowing the divisibility test for 9.
If the sum of the digits in a number add up to a multiple of 9, then the
number itself is divisible by 9. The sum of the digits in this problem
couldn’t be 9, though, because the sum of even numbers can never
be odd. The smallest multiple of 9 with only even digits must be the
smallest combination of three even numbers that add up to 18. It would
have to be 288.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 227

 Also, when the multiples of 9 are organized into a table, an interesting
pattern emerges. By looking at the digit sums and the changes to the
ones and tens digit, we see some interesting things.

Table of the First Forty Multiples of 9

9×1=9 9 × 11 = 99 9 × 21 = 189 9 × 31 = 279

9 × 2 = 18 9 × 12 = 108 9 × 22 = 198 9 × 32 = 288

9 × 3 = 27 9 × 13 = 117 9 × 23 = 207 9 × 33 = 297

9 × 4 = 36 9 × 14 = 126 9 × 24 = 216 9 × 34 = 306

9 × 5 = 45 9 × 15 = 135 9 × 25 = 225 9 × 35 = 315

9 × 6 = 54 9 × 16 = 144 9 × 26 = 234 9 × 36 = 324

9 × 7 = 63 9 × 17 = 153 9 × 27 = 243 9 × 37 = 333

9 × 8 = 72 9 × 18 = 162 9 × 28 = 252 9 × 38 = 342

9 × 9 = 81 9 × 19 = 171 9 × 29 = 261 9 × 39 = 351

9 × 10 = 90 9 × 20 = 180 9 × 30 = 270 9 × 40 = 360

Why I Chose This Problem

I recently discovered this problem, and I really like it for a number
of reasons. First, it requires a little bit of vocabulary in order to get
started. Students will have to know what a multiple is, they will have to
know what digits are—and more specifically, how digits can differ from
numbers—and they’ll have to understand the difference between even
and odd numbers. I also like how nonintimidating it looks at first glance.
“How hard could it be to find a multiple of 9 that has only even digits?
I shouldn’t have to count up very far.” Because the problem doesn’t look
lengthy or challenging, it comes as a surprise when the correct answer is
actually the 32nd multiple of nine. I anticipate a lot of students writing
out 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, etc, and then getting frustrated or giving up
when they don’t get to the answer fairly quickly.

Second, I like that the problem requires students to perform basic

calculations and that it requires precision in order to get the answer
right without making mistakes. Also, the repetition involved in either
adding 9 over and over or multiplying by 9 over and over is helpful for
students with lower math abilities, and it still provides good practice for
students who are more comfortable working with numbers. Moreover,

228 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

the 9 times tables are interesting because of the pattern that arises in
the tens digit and the ones digit. My hope is that as students start listing
out the multiples of 9, they will be able to see the pattern and work with
it. I like exposing my students to several different ways of thinking about
multiplication. My hope is that they find one that works for them.

And finally, I really like this problem because there are good extension
questions. If a student finishes early, they can find the next smallest
multiple, and then the next one. Once everyone has had plenty of time to
work, the class can talk about divisibility tests, and they could work on
finding all the three-digit multiples of 9 that have only even digits. And
so on.

Why This Is a DOK 3 Problem

This is a DOK 3 problem because it invites multiple approaches, and even
though there is a correct answer, students need to be able to explain why
the number they chose is the correct one. They also have to analyze each
multiple they come up with to make sure that both digits are even. (I
anticipate several students saying that something like 36 or 72 is correct
because it is an even number.) Depending on how quickly students finish,
they might be asked to investigate the pattern that shows up in the
multiples of 9 that only have even digits. Students could then be asked to
draw a conclusion about that pattern.

My Goal for Student Learning

This problem is intended for a class of new students with low math levels,
many of whom struggle with multiplication, and it is going to take a while
for most of them to finish. My goal is for them to stick with the problem
and not get discouraged as the numbers start getting bigger and bigger.
I am giving this problem during the first week of class, and my sense is
that the students aren’t used to struggling with math problems for long
periods of time. Another goal is for students to come up with an organized
approach to tackling this problem. That is, I would like to see some
students create tables or lists rather than simply start multiplying 9 by
randomly chosen numbers. Also, because it’s so early in the cycle, I would
like to see my students feel comfortable talking about their work and the
work of their peers.

Challenges for Students

The first challenge I anticipate involves the vocabulary and phrasing of
the problem. Because I will be working on this problem with a group of
new students, they have only recently been introduced to multiples and
factors. They will likely need a quick refresher. Similarly, I expect to see

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 229

 students struggle with the idea of “even digits,” and we may have to
talk about it as a group to make sure that everyone is on the same page
before we get started.

I also expect students to have a hard time organizing their work, and
I expect to see some mistakes with basic computation as the multiples
get higher and higher. This will require me to intervene somewhat to
help students spot their mistakes—either with adding or multiplying,
depending on their approach. I think that some students will want to
give up after they’ve found the first fifteen or twenty multiples of 9. They
might think that it’s a trick question and that there actually aren’t any
multiples of 9 that have only even digits.

To support students who are struggling with this problem, I will help
them identify mathematical mistakes so that they can correct them as
they go along. I won’t tell them that they’ve made a mistake though;
instead, I’ll ask them to talk about how they got from one number to the
next so that they can see the mistake for themselves. I think that some
students will notice the pattern in multiples of 9 (increasing tens digit,
decreasing ones digit), and so I will help them to articulate it and apply
it to the work that they are doing. For those students who work all the
way through it and don’t see the pattern, I will ask them to look over their
work and talk to me about the changes they see to the digits. I expect that
some students will try to guess-and-check their way through the problem,
which could potentially make it take a very long time. I will talk to these
students about ways they might be able to organize their guesses so that
they don’t lose track of the work they’ve already done.

Extension Questions
If some students finish early, I would ask them to find the next smallest
multiple of 9 with only even digits, and then the next one, and the next
one, and so on. It might seem a little tedious at first, but if I support it
well, I can help students to understand how the divisibility test for 9
works. This is something that I don’t think many, if any, students will
know.

All of the multiples of 9 that are less than 1000 and have only even
digits are: 468, 486, 648, 666, 684, 828, and 882. Even if a student only
got to 468 and 486, I could start having the conversation with them
about how any number with a digit sum equal to a multiple of 9 must
itself be a multiple of 9. Since no combination of even numbers can sum
to 9, they must have to sum to 18. From there, students can work on
finding the other possibilities.

230 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

Student Work
FI DE L’S APPROACH

F idel is one of the strongest students in this group. He attends every

class session, asks good questions, and works hard on every problem
that he encounters. Even this early in the cycle, Fidel’s classmates have
come to recognize him as one of the leaders in the class, and they often
rely on him to help them out when they are struggling. However, Fidel
had a really hard time with this problem.

First off, he needed a reminder on the difference between odd and even
numbers, and after we talked about it as a group, he wrote them down
just to be sure. Then he started working. If you look closely at Fidel’s
work, you’ll see that he started out by writing all of the multiples of 9,
but then he erased them. When I asked why, he explained that when
he got above 100, he noticed that all of the multiples would have a 1 in
them and therefore couldn’t be correct. This is where he gave up on the
list and decided to try guessing and checking. His guesses look a little
disorganized, but there is a method to them. He was trying to locate
multiples of 9 that were in the 200s. His first guesses were much too big,
but he kept making adjustments. He erased most of these, but he left a
few and, after a while he found 9 × 32 = 288.

What was interesting about Fidel’s work is how he noticed some

important qualities about the numbers—namely, that the correct answer
would have to start with a 2, 4, 6, or 8—but he didn’t come up with a
good way of organizing the work that he was doing. Because he guessed
and checked, several students finished the problem before him and
began working on the extension questions. This was a case where the
strongest student in the class struggled the most because the problem-
solving strategy he chose may not have been the most appropriate one.

J EAN MAR I E’S APPROACH

O f all the students in the class, Jean Marie probably has most
difficulty with math. She performs all basic calculations on her
fingers, and she has very little confidence in her ability to grow as a
math student. This was the first extended problem that she had done on
her own.

From the outset, Jean Marie was frustrated by this problem because
she noticed that it had to do with times tables, and she reminded me
several times that she doesn’t know her nines. You’ll even see at the top
of the page that she was drawing circles for the first couple multiples
of 9. While everyone else was working on their own, I spent a lot of
time sitting with Jean Marie and talking her through the problem. She

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 231

 Student Work started with 9 × 1 = 9 but then couldn’t remember
9 × 2. So we talked about how she would figure
it out. She seemed a little embarrassed when
telling me that she would count on her fingers.
But when I told her that her method was fine, she
went back to work. She counted up to 18, and then
counted up another 9 to 27, and so on. From here,
she was able to work on her own, but she tried to
give up about every five minutes. It took a lot of
encouragement to get Jean Marie through this
problem, and she made a lot of mistakes. I made
the decision to help her identify her mistakes so
that she wouldn’t get more frustrated as she got
further and realized she had been working with
incorrect numbers.

In the end, with a lot of support, Jean Marie

did arrive at the correct answer. I liked how
well-organized her method was, and I really
appreciated her ability to stick with a problem
that was so challenging and frustrating to her.
In the end, Jean Marie finished before Fidel did!
And it was a really important moment for her.
She wrestled with a problem that she thought she
could never do, and she was successful.
Student Work
FE LICIANO’S APPROACH

T his was the day when I learned that Feliciano

is incredibly good with numbers and loves doing
math. He did this problem on his second day in
class, and since he was the first to finish, I got to
talk to him about some of the extension questions
that I was hoping to use.

Feliciano started out by listing the multiples

that he knew off the top of his head, and then he
worked additively from there. This approach was
largely typical of what most students did. Each
time he arrived at a new multiple of 9, he added
9, wrote the next one down, and repeated. By
following this pattern, Feliciano got to 288 pretty
quickly, so I asked him to find the next multiple
of 9. He kept working additively for a while before
figuring out that 9 × 52 was equal to 468. Here,
Feliciano stopped and looked a little more closely

232 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

at the relationship between 288 and 468. In the middle of the page, he
adds 2 to the hundreds digit in 288 and subtracts two from the tens
digit, which gives him 468. He repeats the process again to get 648.

At this point, Feliciano and I talked about why this worked. Feliciano
couldn’t articulate the divisibility test for 9, but he was working with
it intuitively when he found 468 and 648. After we talked about how
the digits needed to add up to 18, he was able to find all of the other
combinations, which are scattered around the page. I’m glad I got the
chance to see how this problem worked with a student who was skilled
in math. Feliciano was very engaged with the problem, and he enjoyed
getting to learn and talk about the divisibility test.

Final Thoughts

I really liked the way this problem played out in class. For most of the
students, this was only the second problem-solving activity that they
had done. Because they were new to struggling with math problems,
I hoped that working on this one
would encourage persistence and
help them to come up with strategies
for organization. For the most part,
we met those goals. We also took the
time to talk about the patterns that
appear in multiples of 9, as well as
the divisibility test, which is shown in
the board work at the right. Through
working on this problem and its
extensions, I learned that with enough
preparation, there are interesting
questions that can be asked about any
mathematical idea—even one as basic
as multiples.

n What I Might Change

I wouldn’t change much about how I did this problem. If I do it
again early in the cycle, though, I might try reviewing the different
problem-solving strategies that we had discussed before doing this
problem. That way, students would have to make a more conscious
choice between using a table/chart and trying to guess and check.
Unfortunately, this time, a handful of students spun their wheels
guessing and checking when they could have used a more effective
method. Still, I think they benefited somewhat from doing it the
“wrong way” before moving on to a better way.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 233

 I might also give out hundreds charts to students who really
struggle with their times tables. It could help them to get started,
and it could also help them to identify a pattern that will help
them remember their nines in the future. And lastly, if I do this
problem early in a class cycle again, I might ask students to write a
reflection of what it was like working on the problem.

n Unexpected Challenges
I gave this problem again in another class—one with a wider range
of math levels—and found that it was a little difficult to manage
all of the students. Some students finished the problem quickly,
while others needed me to sit with them and keep them working,
give them feedback on their work, etc. This made it challenging to
keep the higher-level students engaged while still supporting the
students who needed individual attention.

n Student Takeaways
My students liked this problem, and it fit in well with the work
on factors and multiples that we were doing in class earlier in the
week. They enjoyed trying out and discussing some of the problem-
solving strategies that we had been working on as a class. They
also got to hear about different solution methods from their peers,
and they had the opportunity to share their frustrations with the
problem, as well as the sequence of steps they took to break through
that frustration. For one student in particular—Jean Marie—this
problem was a major breakthrough. For the first time in class,
she stuck with something, got angry at it, settled back down, tried
again, failed, tried again, and finally succeeded. She hasn’t given up
on a problem since. This is a great exercise to do with students who
need to learn how to stick with something. It has a very low entry
point, but the discussion can go a lot of different ways.

My students were also able to see the importance of pattern

recognition in math. Recognizing the patterns for multiples of 9
helped several students write out all of the multiples quickly, rather
than adding repeatedly. After we finished this activity, “Look for a
pattern” was added to our list of problem-solving strategies, and it
has since helped students succeed in other difficult problems.

n Advice for Teachers

This is a good low-entry problem for students who are new to your
class, but it could be used at any point in the cycle as a warmup
exercise. Teachers should be prepared for students to get frustrated
and give up, but they should also be prepared with extra questions
for students who breeze through the exercise. The problem works

234 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

 best if you allow plenty of time for the class as a whole to debrief,
especially because students need to see that there is a bigger
takeaway from doing the problem than just crunching numbers.
And there’s a lot of rich territory on which to have that discussion.
Talk about organizing information, talk about patterns, talk about
divisibility tests, and emphasize key vocabulary. Help your students
understand that their struggle was a productive one.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 235

 The Gold Rush Problem

The Problem:
In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California. Over the next several years,
hundreds of thousands of prospectors traveled westward hoping to make their fortunes
mining gold.

A man named Billy Merrell happened to own some of the land where the gold was
discovered. Instead of digging the gold himself, he decided to rent plots of land to the
prospectors. Billy gave each prospector four wooden stakes and a rope measuring exactly
100 meters in length. Each prospector then had to use the stakes and the rope to mark
off a rectangular plot of land.

1 Assuming that each prospector would like to have the biggest possible plot, what should the
dimensions of each plot be? Explain the reasoning behind your answer in a sentence or two.

2 One prospector noticed an advertisement that Billy had posted on his land. It read:
“Join the ropes together! You can get more land if you work together!”
Investigate whether or not this statement is actually true for two or more prospectors who
work together and divide the plot equally, still using just four stakes.

Explain your answer in a few sentences.

from Math Assessment Project (map.mathshell.org)

How I Solved It
This is an optimization problem. Let x and y be the dimensions of the
rectangular plot. Given the constraint of only having 100 meters of rope,
the perimeter of my plot would be 2x + 2y = 100. The area would be
A = xy. I started by solving the perimeter equation for y so that I could
substitute it into the equation for area.

2x + 2y = 100
–2x –2x
2y = 100 – 2x
2 2 2
y = 50 – x

Substituting this into the equation for area, I have A = x(50 – x), or
A = 50x – x2. The graph of this equation will be a parabola with a single

236 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

critical point, and that critical point will give me the x-value that will
maximize area. To find that point, I need to know the derivative of A
with respect to x; this will be the equation for slope of the tangent line to
the graph. The critical point I’m looking for will have a tangent line with
slope 0.

The derivative of my area formula is A’ = 50 – 2x, where A’ represents

the slope of the tangent line at a chosen point. Since I’m trying to find
the point where the slope is zero, I substitute 0 for A’. Now I have
0 = 50 – 2x. When I solve this for x, I get the solution x = 25 meters.
So this is the optimal length, which means that my optimal width is also
25 meters. The shape that will maximize area is a square that is
25 meters by 25 meters.

To answer the second part of the question, I applied the same rationale
to a rope that is now 200 meters in length. If the optimal shape is a
square, then it would be 50 meters by 50 meters, and it would have an
area of 2500 square meters. This means that each prospector would get
1250 square meters of land, which is twice as much as they would have
before. So it does make sense to “join the ropes.”

Other Ways to Solve This Problem

The method I outlined above is impractical for teaching, and I only tried
it to challenge myself and to see if I could remember how optimization
problems worked. So after solving it algebraically, I wanted to examine
the relationship between area and perimeter just so that I could see
how much the area changed when I made slight modifications to the
dimensions. I drew a few different rectangles and ended up at the
square that was my final answer from before.

40 35 30 25

10
15
20
25

A = 400 A = 525 A = 600 A = 625

The pattern I noticed when drawing the rectangles out in this order—
from long and skinny to square—showed me that as a shape becomes
closer in form to a square, the area increases.

I also wrote it out in table form, just so that I could have an organized
chart showing the areas given by different dimensions. I started the
table at 40 by 10, as shown below, and worked my way up.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 237

 Length Width Area
40 10 400
39 11 429
38 12 456
37 13 481
36 14 504 The table is
35 15 525 interesting because
it provides the
34 16 544
opportunity to see the
33 17 561 consecutive difference
32 18 576 in area each time that
31 19 589 the dimensions are
30 20 600 adjusted by 1 meter.
I noticed a pattern,
29 21 609
which is added in the
28 22 616 updated table below:
27 23 621
26 24 624
25 25 625
24 26 624

Length Width Area Consec. Diff.

40 10 400 +29 = 429
39 11 429 +27 = 456
38 12 456 +25 = 481
37 13 481 +23 = 504
36 14 504 +21 = 525
35 15 525 +19 = 544
34 16 544 +17 = 561
33 17 561 +15 = 576
32 18 576 +13 = 589
31 19 589 +11 = 600
30 20 600 +9 = 609
29 21 609 +7 = 616
28 22 616 +5 = 621
27 23 621 +3 = 624
26 24 624 +1 = 625
25 25 625 MAX
24 26 624 –1 = 624

238 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

Why I Chose This Problem
I chose the gold rush problem because it is similar to a problem that I
had used in my class before; the version I used involved maximizing the
area of a garden given a limited amount of available fencing to surround
the garden. What I liked about the gold rush problem is that it took
the garden problem a step further by asking students to analyze what
happens to area when perimeter is doubled, tripled, etc, and I like how
it invites different strategies for solving. I also like how this problem
encourages creative thinking about basic shapes. It invites students to
construct several different rectangles, which ideally will lead them to a
better understanding of how dimensions relate to perimeter. Doing this
also reinforces computation skills, and so it works well in a multilevel
classroom. Once students arrive at their answers, there is a lot to talk
about. For example, is a square a rectangle? Is a rectangle a square?
Assuming that I did share a plot of land with another prospector, what
would be the most equitable way to split it? Do we split the land, or do
we split the profits? At what point in joining the ropes together does the
workload become too much for one prospector? And so on.

And finally, there’s a bit of historical context here, and so it fits well into
a class that also has a history component. It acts as a good springboard
into a discussion about the pre-Civil War period and the waves of
westward migration that were occurring around the time.

Why This Is a DOK 3 Problem

Depending on how the problem is used and what you’re asking your
students to produce in the end, this could actually be a DOK 4 problem.
At DOK 4, students are essentially completing a research project that
allows them to draw a conclusion not just about a specific situation, but
about a mathematical concept in general. In this case, the students first
have to read and understand a situation that might not be immediately
clear to them. From here, they have to think creatively about how they
might get started. They then perform some basic calculations, but they
also have to keep in mind that they’re looking to maximize area while
keeping perimeter the same. This attention to multiple constraints and
geometric concepts requires some higher-level thinking than a standard
DOK 1 or 2 question in which students might just be asked to calculate
the area of a shape (level 1), or calculate the area of a shape given its
perimeter (level 2).

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 239

 My Goal for Student Learning
One goal in presenting this problem is that my students will be able to
apply the basic concepts of area and perimeter in a setting that is a little
different from what they might be used to. I also hope to see that they’re
able to think creatively about the problem and make adjustments to the
shape of their plots in order to see how the shape of the rectangle has a
significant effect on its area. In other words, I want them to be able to
create a possible plot but then—without my intervention—try drawing
other rectangles as a way of checking to see if their answer is correct.
Another goal is for students to verbalize the relationship between the
shape of a rectangle and its area. What the students should notice is that,
as the rectangles become more square-like, the area increases. I also
would like to see an organized approach to solving this problem, although
I realize that the way students organize their work will differ greatly.

Challenges for Students

I anticipate a number of students drawing one rectangle and thinking
that they’ve answered the question after they’ve successfully calculated
its area. Moreover, I anticipate some resistance when I prompt them
to try drawing other rectangles so that they can compare the areas of
each. I also anticipate some issues with understanding the situation.
Even though the prompt specifically mentions rectangular plots, I have
a feeling that some students will miss this part. They’ll understand that
they’re getting four stakes and a rope, but they won’t really know where
to go from there. So I might have to intervene a bit just to clarify exactly
what the question is asking them today. I also foresee students jumping
to a quick conclusion about the second part of the question. That is, I
think that some will gloss over the part about joining two ropes together
and just assume that because you’re sharing with another prospector,
you would get less land.

To support students who are struggling, I will first ask them to tell
me what is happening in the problem. I would want to make sure that
they understand exactly what they’re getting from Billy and why they
are getting those materials. If they are unable to make a rectangle,
I might ask them to draw one, and then I would ask what the length
of the rectangle could be. They could then try a few things and check
their work. For students who try to stop after drawing one rectangle,
I’ll ask how they know that the one they drew provides the most land
to work with. So after they try one more, I’ll ask that they try another.
And so on. I have some students in my class who really struggle to do
long multiplication, and so I may allow them to use calculators. The goal
of this activity is to encourage reasoning about shapes; it’s not about

240 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

crunching numbers.

Extension Questions
If some students finish early, I would ask what would happen if three,
four, or five people joined their ropes together. How much land would
each person get in these cases? And is there a pattern to the increase
in land you get by working together with other prospectors? How could
you organize the data to see what the pattern might be? Could this be
viewed as an input/output table, or a function? If so, what would be the
rule of the function? How do you know? How many ropes would you need
to join together so that you could get 7500 square meters to work with?

Student Work
E LISA AN D B E LE N’S APPROACH

B elen is one of the brightest students in the class. Elisa struggles and
has missed several classes because of her work schedule and other
issues. This group had a hard time getting started, but once they figured
out a pattern, they were able to make progress. What I like about their
representation is how organized it is. They begin with a rectangle that
is 30 meters by 20 meters; it has an area of 600. The next rectangle they
drew had dimensions of 28 by 22, with an area of 616. When I talked
to B. and E. about this, they said that they were surprised about what
happened to the area. They explained that they noticed how, when they
decreased the length and increased the width, the area got bigger.
So they kept doing this until they arrived at the dimensions 26 Student Work
by 24, for an area of 624. This was the greatest area possible,
they said.

When I asked why they didn’t go a step further and try 25 by

25, they reasoned that it wasn’t allowed: The plot had to be a
rectangle, and 25 by 25 would be a square. I was interested
in this solution because I predicted that students would get
hung up on the square/rectangle issue, and these two were
adamant that the plot could not be a square. So we talked
about this. Also, notice their reasoning at the bottom. It says,
“After a while we figure it out that if you increase the width,
then you have to decrease the length in order to have the same
perimeter, but bigger Area.” I understood what they meant, but
we talked about it for a while to get some clarification. Is there
a point at which decreasing length and increasing width doesn’t
increase area anymore? What is that point? Why does it work
this way? This group’s graphical approach was very typical of
what other students tried.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 241

 TRAVIS AN D LATOYA’S APPROACH

W hat interested me about this group’s approach was that the first
rectangle they drew was actually correct. But they didn’t know
that. So I prompted them to try drawing a few others. Travis was sure
that he could find one with a greater area, because he reasoned that as
the length value got bigger and bigger, the area would too. He wasn’t
really thinking multiplicatively yet. So he tried some other rectangles:
40 by 10, 20 by 30, and 45 by 5. He told me that he was really surprised
to find that the 45 meter by 5 meter rectangle had the smallest area. So
he, Latoya, and I went into a hallway that was about 5 feet wide and
looked at how narrow this would actually be.

Travis and Latoya were able to complete the second part of the question
pretty quickly. Latoya said that she knew the shape would need to be
a square again, since the square from part 1 had a bigger area than
the rectangles. They did some calculations and concluded: “It would be
better to join the ropes because you can make your width and length
wider by each side. By doing this you increase your profit. There is also
more land for you and your partner to dig.” I was really interested in the
comment about profit, and so we talked about it with the whole group.
We wondered whether having more land would necessarily guarantee
more profit. So in talking about this, we touched on probability, and we
also began thinking about what the most equitable way of sharing the
plot would be. Is it more fair to split the land, or is it more fair to split
the total profit? Most of the students concluded that it would be the
most fair to split the total profit, or weight in gold, equally. Though some
said they would prefer to take a gamble and have half of the land all to
themselves. This was interesting, I thought.

Student Work

242 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

 Student Work
RODOLFO, CLE M E NTE, AN D
J U LIO’S APPROACH

R odolfo and Julio have been with

me for a while, but Clemente is
pretty new. All have limited English
proficiency, and so it was fascinating
to me that their description of
how they solved this problem was
the most verbal of any that I saw.
What isn’t clear from this photo is
that, before they submitted this
poster, they had done another that
contained pictures and nothing
else. I told them that I would like to
know more about what they had to say about the problem, meaning that
I would like them to talk about it to the group. They decided to start
over and take the approach you see above.

After finishing part 1, Rodolfo was sure that there was no way it would
be beneficial to work with another prospector. So I asked him to prove
it to me, and he started working. When I checked back with their table
only three or four minutes later, Rodolfo told me that he was wrong:
If he worked with another prospector, he would get twice as much
land. Because they answered so quickly, I asked: “What if all four of
us decided to join our ropes together? How much land would we get
then?” And they produced the explanation on the right. Their drawing is
interesting. It suggests that the four small squares could be put together
to form the big square with area of 10,000 square meters. I asked them
about this. They explained to the group that they didn’t mean it that
way, and they realized how their drawing didn’t accurately represent
their thinking. This approach to presenting their solution was great and
not at all what I was expecting.

CRYSTAL AN D STEVE N’S APPROACH

I liked Crystal’s approach because of its clarity and simplicity. But it’s
also worth noting that Crystal needs almost constant support in the
classroom. She has a hard time struggling on her own, and her hand
shoots up to ask for my help once every five minutes or so. When she
first looked at this problem, she gave up right away and said that she
didn’t have any idea where to start. So we first just talked about what
was happening in the problem. Once Crystal figured out that she needed
to make a rectangular plot, she was able to produce the four rectangles
above. And she worked independently for the next fifteen minutes

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 243

 without asking a single question.
After a few tries, she arrived at the
correct answer.

Steven was really struggling.

Despite some help and some tips
from me, he wasn’t able to find any
rectangles that had a perimeter of
100 meters. The only one he could
come up with was 25 by 25. This
was good, but I wanted to see some
flexibility in how he was thinking
about this, so I pushed him to keep
trying. Crystal was sitting next to
Student Work
him, and when I stepped away to
talk to another student, she started showing Steven what she had been
working on. Steven followed along with what she was saying and asked
her questions. I thought this was a really great moment for Crystal.
Here was a student who had no confidence in her own abilities, teaching
another student how to create rectangles. I also noticed that Steven was
really listening. So I stayed out of the way, and they finished the project
together, with Crystal doing most of the heavy lifting and Steven asking
good questions along the way.

Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed doing this problem with my classes, and it’s one that I
would highly recommend using with any class level. I wasn’t whether
or not to have small groups present their strategies to the class using
posters, but I’m really glad I did. In some cases, I was explicit with
students in asking them to represent all of the steps they took to get to
their answers—meaning, I wanted to see the mistakes as well as the
successes. But with other groups, I just let them go. I found this to be
an effective way of structuring the discussion about student responses.
By doing this, we got to talk about different ways of structuring and
illustrating our thinking, but we also got to talk about the choices
that the students made in terms of what to include and what to take
out when creating their posters. Over the past two years, a big part
of my teaching has involved talking about student work, and this
activity only reinforced it for me. Time spent talking about thinking
and talking about strategy is just as valuable as time spent solving
equations or graphing lines. I also learned a lot about my students’
ability to persevere and struggle from doing this activity. I do at least
one of these long-form problems every week, and at the beginning of the

244 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

cycle, my students tended to give up, get frustrated, and ask me why I
was making them do problems like this. But now that we’ve done ten or
twelve of them, my students have become real problem-solvers. It was
affirming to see that we can teach persistence and that our students do
benefit from it.

n What I Might Change

When I did the problem this time, I asked my students to work
independently for about twenty minutes, but then I allowed them
to work with the other people at their table for the next forty
minutes. I think that this improved the “presentation” element of
working on this problem, but I would be interested in seeing what
would happen if students just work independently the entire time.
I plan to try this next time around, just to see what I get from
them. My sense is that the small-group work facilitated some good
discussion, and it helped keep struggling students engaged. Even
if they weren’t able to completely solve the problem on their own,
they were able to provide input and feedback as the group worked
together. I’m also interested in trying this activity over a period of
a week. Students could submit something on the first day. I would
then provide some feedback and ask them to clarify their thinking
in places, and I would ask them to resubmit their work. I’d like to
see how their explanations and processes would change if they were
given several days, rather than just an hour, to think and elaborate.

n Unexpected Challenges
I used this problem with two groups of students who didn’t have
a lot of experience with geometry. Most of them were able to pick
up on area and perimeter quickly—in large part because it wasn’t
completely new—but some had a very hard time. I can think of
two or three students who just couldn’t figure out how to make a
rectangle have a perimeter of 100 meters. Or, if they were able to
find one, then they couldn’t find one with different dimensions.
In these cases, I just asked the students to focus on creating
rectangles, not finding the one with the biggest area: “Calculating
the area can wait; for now, let’s just see how many different
rectangles we can find that have the perimeter we’re looking for.”
Next time I’ll be better prepared to help students with this part of
the problem.

n Student Takeaways
My students really liked this problem, and they liked getting the
opportunity to explain how they solved it. The students did learn
some important mathematical concepts, but I think that the most

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 245

 important thing they got out of it was thinking about how they
would create their posters so that they could talk about their
thinking. They learned that they needed to show the beginning
and intermediary steps before just getting to the answer because
this would help their classmates understand where the approach
came from and how they worked with it. Through the course of
the activity, I saw my students start to think like teachers. When
talking about their strategies, they explained all their steps and
they fielded questions, both from me and from their peers.

n Advice for Teachers

This is a great problem that gives students a lot of material to talk
about. On the surface, it just seems like another word problem, but
there are lots of extension questions you could pose to encourage
further thinking, and there are good discussions that can arise after
the students have already found the solution. S o don’t feel like you
have to rush through it. Take your time, talk to your students about
their thinking, and then ask them to show their thinking to their
peers. You’ll also get a sense of what your students are interested
in. Mine, for example, were really interested in turning this into a
function (because we had just covered functions). Each student will
find something interesting about this problem. So take a little bit of
time to let the class go where they want it to go. Your students will
appreciate it.

246 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

The Movie Theater Problem

The Problem:
At a movie theater in Windsor Terrace, the price of a children’s ticket is
50 percent of the price of an adult’s ticket. Nick and Katie (both adults)
took their three children to see a movie yesterday, and the total for all
the tickets was $36.75. What was the price of each child’s ticket?

Please show all your work, and circle your final answer.

How I Solved It
I solved this problem algebraically. Let x be the price of each child’s
ticket. An adult’s ticket costs twice as much as a child’s ticket, so the
price of each adult’s ticket would be 2x. There are two adults, and so
the total price for their tickets would be 2x + 2x, or 4x. There are three
children, and so their total ticket price would be 3x. The total for all
tickets would therefore be 4x + 3x, or 7x. This should be equal to the
amount paid, $36.75. So:

7x = 36.75

x = 5.25

A child’s ticket costs $5.25.

Other Ways to Solve This Problem

One possibility would be guess and check. Let’s assume that a child’s
ticket is $6.00. If this were true, then the total for the children would
be 3 times $6.00, or $18.00. Since the adult tickets cost twice as much,
and there are two adults, the adults paid $12.00 times 2, or $24.00. The
total for this scenario would be $42.00, which is too high. I could keep
adjusting my guess until I get the correct result.

I could also put this information into a table, which would help me to
organize my guesses. Let’s say I started by guessing that a child’s ticket
is $4.00, and then I recorded each subsequent guess into the table. It
might look something like this:

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 247

 Child’s Ticket Adult’s Ticket Total Cost
$4.00 × 3 = $12.00 $8.00 × 2 = $16.00 $12.00 + $16.00 = $28.00
$5.00 × 3 = $15.00 $10.00 × 2 = $20.00 $15.00 + $20.00 = $35.00
$6.00 × 3 = $18.00 $12.00 × 2 = $24.00 $18.00 + $24.00 = $42.00
$5.50 × 3 = $16.50 $11.00 × 2 = $22.00 $16.50 + $22.00 = $38.50
$5.25 × 3 = $15.75 $10.50 × 2 = $21.00 $15.75 + $21.00 = $36.75

Why Did You Choose This Problem?

What Do You Like About It?
I like the problem because even though the situation is easy to
understand, solving the problem is difficult. Because my students aren’t
familiar with algebra yet, they’ll have to puzzle it out using a bit of
guessing and exercising precision and control over basic operations. I’ve
noticed throughout the cycle that this group of students does very well
with calculation and that they don’t have too much trouble working
out rather complex problems when the methods required are clear to
them. However, they struggle when they have to puzzle things out for
themselves, especially when there are no given answers to choose from.
Had I given this problem the first week of class, I probably could have
expected most of my students to come up with an incorrect answer. Now
that we’ve had a bit more practice with problem solving, though, I expect
to see far more correct answers. And finally, this question requires
close reading, which is what my students struggle with the most. I
deliberately made the wording in the first part a little more confusing
than it needed to be, which will require them to think carefully about
how the two ticket prices are related. They’ll also be thrown by the
percent figure in there, and I’m guessing that a number of students will
try to apply formulas like the percent proportion, which probably won’t
be of much help here. The question requires a more comprehensive
understanding of what percent means. I’ll also be interested to see how
many “correct” answers I get that give me the price of an adult’s ticket
instead of a child’s ticket.

Why Is This a Good Problem?

I think this problem is a good fit for this particular group, and it will
help my students to persevere in problem solving. The problem has at
least a couple of different solution methods, and it requires a synthesis
of basic operations, close reading, and checking the answer. It requires
several steps in that the students will have to correctly identify the
number of adults and the number of children and then perform a few

248 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

rounds of basic operations. It requires also reasoning and inference
in that the students should use their own knowledge of the world to
assume that a child’s ticket likely wouldn’t cost something like $1.50 or
$22.00; common sense should help the students to arrive at an answer.
Students will definitely have to think about what the question is asking
before jumping right in, because in a sense they’ll be working backward
from the total to determine the cost of the “parts.” I think that this
requires a holistic approach to the concepts, in that they’ll see how the
basic operations relate to each other and to common, everyday settings.
This question also requires careful reading, and most students will need
to read it at least two or three times to really get a handle on it . Lastly,
this problem definitely invites the use of a few different problem-solving
strategies. I’m assuming most students will use guess-and-check; they’ll
draw pictures; they’ll work backwards; and they’ll look for patterns as
they try these strategies.

Challenges for Students

n Reading
As I noted above, my students have more difficulty with
understanding the question than with performing calculations.
I anticipate that some will simply assume all the ticket prices are
the same; others might misinterpret the number of people seeing
the movie; and others might return the price of an adult ticket instead
of a child’s ticket.

n Puzzling out an answer

This group has a hard time digging into really difficult problems when
the answer choices aren’t given to them. I think that this problem
will make them try a few different methods or guesses to arrive at the
answer. Some might get frustrated in doing this and might just give up.

n Checking their answer and making sure it makes sense

As with most of the students I teach at this level, this group has a
tendency to come up with an answer and then just go with it, without
making sure that it makes sense or that it actually checks out. When
I see the student work, I’m hoping to see that at least a few people
went back and made sure their answer was correct.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 249

 Support
n I will emphasize careful reading and ask good clarifying questions. If a
student is struggling, I’ll read through the question with them and
make sure that they understand both the criteria set forth in the
problem and exactly what it is that the question is asking them. This
will help to set them on the right track in terms of figuring out how to
solve the problem.

n “I don’t know where to start.” This is something that I hear a lot, and
when this happens during this activity, I’ll ask what the student
thinks the answer could be. So, if a student is really struggling with
this problem, I’ll ask that they start by taking a guess at what the cost
of a child’s ticket will be, then I’ll see where that takes them.

n I will need to help students think about their answers and whether or not
they make sense. I plan to ask students how they can be sure that
their answer is correct and asking that they prove their answers to
me. This will show me that they really understand the question and
why their answer is correct.

Student Work
LI N DA’S APPROACH

Linda is perhaps the brightest student in the class, but because her
English-speaking and reading skills aren’t too good, she sometimes
gets hung up on problems with confusing wording. Her work on this
exercise exemplified this problem. I knew when I included a mention
of “50 percent” in the question that students would first try to use the
percent proportion to solve; this was Linda’s approach. She found that
50 percent of 36.75 was equal to 18.375, and it was hard for her to let
go of this number. Once she got it, she divided it by three and assumed
that each child’s ticket must be $6.125. She was then convinced that
this had to be part of the answer. Linda’s work—and her failure to solve
the problem correctly—showed both me and her how much she needs
to work on creative approaches to problem solving. Linda immediately
associated the percent figure with the percent proportion that we
worked on in class, and then couldn’t understand how it could be wrong.
She feels comfortable working with formulas and struggles when they
don’t always work out.

250 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

 1 Why did you choose this sample of work?
As I mentioned above, this sample shows a problem that Linda has
struggled with all semester. She doesn’t like to take guesses, draw
pictures, or work backwards. She likes to fall back on the formulas
that she has memorized, and when those don’t work out, she freezes
and can’t understand how her answer could be wrong, no matter
how much I try to lead her into thinking about the problem more
comprehensively. Linda’s work shows a student who sees numbers,
plugs them into what she knows, and thinks that it should result in
the correct answer, which, most of the time for Linda, it does. Oddly,
Linda also started asking people across the room for clues, which
is something I’ve never seen her do. When I would turn my back to
her and work with someone else, I would hear her whispering to
other students asking how they got the answer. It really shows how
uncomfortable she gets when her formulas don’t work.

2 How typical was this student’s approach in your class?

Very typical. Of the seven students who tried the exercise, all seven
started by finding 50 percent of $36.75. Most of the others, however,
realized that this approach wasn’t getting them anywhere and then
moved on. Linda had a hard time with this, even when I changed
the wording of the question to say that “an adult’s ticket cost twice
as much as a child’s ticket.” Although I thought that changing the
wording might affect Linda’s thinking—which it did for many of the
other students—she still couldn’t shake the notion that 50 percent
of $36.75 had something to do with the answer.

R U B E N’S APPROACH

From Ruben’s work, it’s difficult to tell exactly how his thinking is
organized, which I found interesting. He began by dividing 36.75 by
5, and came up with an answer of $7.35. When I pressed him on that
answer and asked if everything checked out, he was confident that it
did. But then when I asked him if the adults and the children all paid
the same price for tickets, he recognized his mistake. Then, like Linda,
he found 50 percent of the total ticket cost, but he seems to have realized
fairly quickly that it wasn’t working. Unlike Linda, though, he continued
to try to puzzle out an answer by labeling different numbers and by
repeating values for the ticket prices for the adults and for the children.
Ruben was not able to come up with the correct answer.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 251

 1 Why did you choose this sample of student work?
I primarily chose it because of the student. Ruben isn’t very
strong mathematically, but in general he has a good head on his
shoulders and enough real-world experience using math that he’s
able to come up with correct answers, or at least strong guesses.
In two consecutive classes, he passed both both forms of the TASC
Readiness Test. This surprised me, in large part because Ruben’s
in-class work usually looks like it did on this exercise; that is, he
tends to just jump into a problem and plug in numbers. So I found
this example of work interesting because it seems like Ruben
doesn’t really have a plan, but he has consistently scored well on
all assessments he’s given in class, which tells me that I must be
missing something. This kind of disorganized work is something
that I warn students against in class, but Ruben doesn’t seem
able to break the habit—and maybe that’s okay. To my mind,
organization seems essential to doing math, and through his work
Ruben is making me call that idea into question. Or maybe we just
have different ideas of organization.

2 How typical was this student’s approach in your class?

Fairly atypical. In most of the samples I collected, the students
seemed to really consider things for a long time before writing
anything down, and even then, they didn’t write much. Ruben just
went right for it and worked with just about any number he could
find. By far, he wrote more and tried more than any other student.

AR I’S APPROACH

Like Ruben and Linda, one of the first things Ari did was calculate 50
percent of the total ticket price. She appears to have abandoned that
idea pretty quickly though. She then did what Ruben did and divided
36.75 by 5 to get $7.35. This is where Ari made an interesting mistake:
she began calculating 50 percent of 7.35, and then tried to work with
the resulting value, $3.67, as the child’s ticket price. At this point she
got stuck and asked for some guidance. When we checked her answer
against the criteria set forth in the question, she saw that her answer
was wrong and decided to try something else and started guessing. As
you see at the bottom of her page, she tried a few different child’s ticket
prices and then calculated the totals, adjusting her guesses as necessary
until she arrived at the correct answer.

1 Why did you choose this sample of student work?

Ari was the only student who answered this question correctly
on her own, and she was the second student to come up with an

252 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

 answer after Ruben’s initial incorrect one. In all, it took her about
ten minutes. Everyone else in the class labored over the problem
for more than a half hour and needed a good deal of guidance to
come up with an answer. When Ari got the answer of $5.25, she was
also confident in it and was able to prove that it was correct using
her calculator. Ari came into the class pretty unsure of herself,
but she has become a great student and a leader in the classroom.
Her ability to try different methods and be confident in her answer
shows really reflects her growth as a learner.

2 How typical was this student’s approach in your class?

Initially, it was very typical. Ari was hung up on the numbers given
to her in the problem and fell back on the mathematical methods
that she would normally use to solve a problem. But when she
realized that those didn’t work, she felt comfortable stepping away
from them and making a guess. Soon after her first incorrect guess,
she realized that she would get to the correct answer using the
guess-and-check strategy and continued working until she came up
with the answer. Very few other students felt comfortable guessing,
and even when I recommended that they try it, those students were
resistant.

Final Thoughts
I learned that even though I have adopted more of a problem-solving
approach to the teaching of math in this course, I still have a ways to go.
My students’ relative inability to puzzle out an answer to this problem
showed me that they still have a long way to go in terms of being
problem solvers. They did a good job mathematically, which shows me
that I’ve at least done a reasonably effective job of teaching computation,
but their work on this problem evidence a real lack of comprehensive
understanding of mathematical concepts—in this case, percent. I
mentioned this in my workshop reflection, and it was made concrete in
class when I gave my students this problem.

All of this showed reminded me that teaching computation is such a

small part of the battle in HSE math. I’m now thinking that the best
thing to do is to work on fewer problems in class and instead really work
hard on just a few problems, emphasizing the deep connections between
concepts. It’s great for students to see and work on a wide variety of
problems, but if the conceptual understanding is missing, they still
won’t be able to solve difficult problems like this one on their own.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 253

 n What I Might Change
I think that in changing the wording to involve a mention of
percent, I made this problem a little too difficult. Next time, I might
try saying that an adult ticket costs twice as much as a child’s
ticket and then see where my students take it. Another thought I
had is that we could have a discussion as a class about what the
50 percent means in the context of the question. Does it mean that
the children’s tickets were 50 percent of the total cost? How can we
connect 50 percent to a fraction? What do we need to calculate 50
percent of? And so on.

n Student Takeaways
I think that there is a great benefit in applying something that
you know you know only to learn that it doesn’t always work out
the way you think it should. In this case, almost everyone jumped
straight to the percent proportion, because it so often does help
them to get to the correct answer, even if it’s only a step along the
way. Here, falling back on the formula they had been using all
semester actually did them a disservice in solving this problem. It
is my hope that working on this problem for the length of time that
they did helped them to understand that they sometimes need to be
a little bit more creative.

It also really emphasized close reading, which is something that all

of my students have identified as something they need to work on.
Several students came up with answer that added up to $36.75, but
they ignored the criteria that a child’s ticket costs half as much as
an adult’s ticket. While it’s important to know what the question
is asking and to focus your efforts toward answering it, it’s also
important to keep the constraints in mind.

n Unexpected Challenges
I really didn’t think they would have quite as much trouble working
with and understanding the constraint built into the problem—
that children’s tickets cost half as much as adult tickets. Several
of them were able to come up with answers, but no student—save
perhaps Ari—showed me a correct answer on their first try. It was
also difficult to nudge students away from calculating 50 percent of
the total ticket price without giving too much away. And then when
I did, and when I encouraged them to try making a guess, they
would kind of roll their eyes and dismiss the suggestion, because I
think that many of my students see guessing and checking as “not
real math.” They want to know a more concrete, more typically
“mathematical” method. So this is something that I will try to build
on more before I give this question in the future.

254 REFLECTIVE TEACHING THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH

n Advice for Teachers
I would recommend that a teacher first give the problem exactly as
it is written, just to see what students are able to com up with. But
then, I think it’s important to carefully structure the clues given to
the students as they continue struggling, and it’s just as important
to reinforce problem-solving strategies. I might also recommend
leading with a less confusingly worded constraint; the teacher
could then discuss other ways that the constraint could be written.
For example, each student could say that a child’s ticket is half as
much as an adult’s, or that each adult’s ticket is twice as much as
a child’s, or that an adult’s ticket costs 100% more than a child’s
ticket. This might be an interesting way to reinforce concepts.

Guessing and checking got a few people to the right answer, but
that was the only method that worked. After the first twenty
minutes to a half hour, I put five answer choices on the board and
told them that one of those answers was exactly correct. At this
point, the students started to remember that they could try each
one against the constraints set forth in the question—which, at
this point, we had gone over together as a group to make sure
that everyone was on the same page—and they came up with the
answer. I was pleased to see that they were able to work backwards,
but when I teach that solution method next semester, I’ll be sure to
do a better job of linking it to guessing and checking.

It might also be interesting, once students have arrived at the

correct answer, to have them create a similar question of their
own and then solve it. Or it might also be good to have students
write new questions based on the values in the question and the
answer. I like to emphasize that doing math is a creative process,
and I often have students write their own problems based on the
concepts covered in class that day. I haven’t, however, had them use
information from an existing question—one that they had solved—
to come up with something unique. I think I’ll try that next time.

THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH REFLECTIVE TEACHING 255

 Education is what happens to the
other person, not what comes out
of the mouth of the educator.
—Myles Horton

256 THE CUNY HSE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK • MATH