Instructional models

Launch > Explore > Connect

reSolve uses a three-phase instructional model for our problem-solving tasks: Launch, Explore, and Connect. We use this model as it allows time and space for students to engage in meaningful mathematical activity and to refine their understandings of powerful mathematical ideas. As the teacher, you also play a very important and active role as you implement this model.

Launch

The problem is introduced to the students by the teacher without telling them how to solve it. A ‘hook’ or entry point, such as a realistic or imagined context, is often used as a tool to launch the problem. This hook provides a way for students to think and talk about the mathematics as they engage in the Explore phase.

Explore

Through the Explore phase, students investigate the task and, as they do, they make sense of the important mathematical ideas addressed in the task. The teacher's role is to notice and provoke student thinking. You do this through your observations of what students are doing and saying, in terms of their mathematical activity. You engage in conversations with students about the mathematics, asking carefully crafted questions to assess student understanding and trying to advance them towards the lesson’s learning goal.

You do not provide students with a solution strategy, but help them to navigate the process of their own thinking.

Connect

This is the most important phase where the teacher carefully orchestrates a whole class discussion. You may have heard this phase referred to as the “Summarise”. At reSolve, we use the term “Connect” because the focus of this phase is to make connections: connections between the different strategies used by students and connections to the main learning goal of the lesson.

The Connect phase often includes selecting students to share their solution strategies to make the mathematics visible. This involves more than a ‘show and tell’ activity of student work. The different solutions are shared and then discussed so that students can compare and highlight differences and similarities between the solution strategies. The similarities between solutions often highlight the important mathematical generalisations that can be made. The Connect phase is also an opportunity for the teacher to explicitly model formal ways of representing mathematics, to teach new mathematical ideas and address misconceptions or gaps in students’ understanding.

The Connect phase is also an important part of the Japanese lesson structure. The Connect phase is known as neriage, which means to ‘polish up’. Here, the teacher orchestrates discussion about the ideas and approaches that students used to solve the problem, to help them polish up their solutions, to learn mathematical content. The whole class discussion is regarded as the heart of the lesson, which can only happen because of the student problem solving done at the beginning.

Discuss with your colleagues

• How is the Launch Explore Connect model different to other instructional models that you have used in your mathematics teaching?

 

 

 

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