Curricular Design – 21st Century Learning

I chose to try and implement an activity that required critical thinking and collaboration. I taught a lesson on vectors.  I gave students a very rudimentary understanding of what a vector is (a quantity that has both magnitude and direction) and how to use proper notation with describing a vector.  I think posed a few open ended questions about vectors such as How could you find the magnitude of a vector? and How could you find the direction angle of a vector? Both of these questions are related to concepts that we have studied throughout the trimester, so students should have been about the figure these problems out on their own.  I allowed students to work together in small groups to try and figure out a way to solve the problem.  It worked out just fine as at least one person in the group was able to figure it out and share that with his or her peers.  I would like to believe that this gave students a little more ownership of the content as they had to figure it out on their own.