Students

In this lesson, the choices of instructional strategies, materials, technology, and the sequence of learning tasks reflect your students’ backgrounds, interests, and needs. The choice of materials used in lessons and how the groups are formed and structured all relate to specific student strengths and learning needs .



 The opening video relates to the students' interests, as it involves a cartoon rapper who describes the steps involved in long division as well as the appropriate academic vocabulary relating to this process. By relating to the students' prior knowledge of long division of integers, this strategy will help the students build new knowledge of the steps involved in long division of polynomials, which is supported by constructivism.   Although some of the students will already have knowledge of long division of integers, reviewing this procedure is integral not only to compare it to the steps involved in long division of polynomials, but also to support other students who may not have a strong foundation of this process. The following problems involving division of polynomials by a monomial and then later by binomials will help support the progression of student learning by slowly building toward more advanced topics. In addition, presenting a variety of methods to solve certain problesm--by factoring and canceling, by long division, and finally by synthetic division--will allow the students to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of division of polynomials and allow them to choose which method works best for them.   The choice of using videos and interactive demonstrations as supplements to the numerous examples and illustrations of the different methods used to solve the problems will provide the students with multiple modalities in order to better visualize and conceptually understand the division of polynomials. Certain students learn more effectively through visual demonstrations such as videos while others learn much more efficiently through numerous examples and repetition. Even more, certain students learn at a much higher rate when working individually while others work much better in pairs or groups. Thus, this lesson will involve numerous examples where the students will visually have to follow the steps in the process of long division of polynomials, and then solve problems on their own, in pairs, and in groups. The groups will be structured both heterogeneously and homogeneously throughout this lesson. The heterogeneous grouping will allow the stronger students to aid in the learning process of the students who do not have as strong of a background in this topic, and the homogeneous grouping will allow the students who work at a faster pace to be challenged while the students who work more gradually will not feel pressured to move too quickly through the material causing them to not fully understand the concepts and processes.