Deconstructing New TEKS Toolkit Geometry Pages
14 new TEKS high school geometry pages are now available in Goalbook Toolkit. Not only do these content pages offer new instructional content, goals, and strategies to Toolkit but they contain detailed example diagrams that make it clear to teachers how to scaffold geometry instruction. This allows teachers to strategically design instruction that maintains a high level of rigor and ensures students take on the bulk of the cognitive load at each level of support.
Diving Deeper with Readiness Standards
The newest geometry pages align to the STAAR Readiness Standards for Texas, which require a deeper instructional focus for a number of reasons:
- They are essential for success in the current grade or course. (They aren’t typically focused on explicitly in subsequent grades.)
- They prepare learners for the next grade or course.
- They focus on essential skills and knowledge that support college and career readiness.
- By nature of their complexity, they necessitate in-depth instruction.
Making Math Visible and Accessible
Because the Readiness Standards are so important, we’ve prioritized making the knowledge and skills associated with the standards as accessible as possible to students when we designed these pages. In order to help all students master the standards, it is important to provide them with multiple entry points into the problem-solving process, and that is what these pages attempt to do. This is most clearly illustrated by the example diagrams as they scaffold from grade level to an intense level of support. The diagrams in the example below clearly show that the student is responsible for doing the work of reaching the standard, which, in this case, is calculating the length of one side of a triangle in order to prove that it is similar to another triangle. The single essential aspect that changes as support increases is the representation of the elements that students should use to start their work on the problem.
The Grade Level (left) example diagram displays all of the pertinent information that a student needs in order to solve a proportion, i.e. side lengths, labeled vertices, variable for the missing side length, and a clear image of the triangles. This contrasts from the Intense Level of Support (right) example diagram which includes color-coded side lengths on two separate triangles with colors that correspond to the side lengths in the proportionality. What remains constant is that both examples require students to solve for x independently, which is the skill needed to meet the standard.
Geometry is Foundational
The reason we spent so much time figuring out how to support the visual aspects of these example diagrams is because geometry instruction uniquely focuses on mathematical perception. As compared to other mathematical domains, geometry prioritizes perception and spatial awareness as explicit mathematical tools as opposed to peripheral skills that support calculation and algorithmic thinking.
Geometry as a subject also serves as a domain that helps students make sense of other areas of mathematics: fractions and multiplication in arithmetic, the relationships between the graphs of functions, and graphical representations of data in statistics. Seeing math more clearly makes advancing through math much easier, and that is what we hope to accomplish with these pages.
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