If I had “just told them” to do this, they might well have performed the instruction, but the extent to which they really understood why they were following the instruction would not have been as immediately evident. The advantage was that I, as the teacher, could quickly see that certain students had reached a particular level of understanding-because they had deduced for themselves that aligning a ray with 0º was an efficient thing to do. ![]() While I have always leant towards explicit instruction for the most part (primarily because behaviour is easier to manage rather than because I’ve always known about its efficacy), this case illustrates one benefit of not being explicit, which may be an advantage worth exploiting in certain situations. What was especially delightful, however, was that most students deduced for themselves that they could deliberately choose to rotate the protractor so that one of the rays was aligned with 0º on the protractor, thus making the final step easy/redundant! While this third step constituted an extra bit of work compared to positioning a protractor in the “correct” way, subtraction was a relatively basic skill compared to the amount of decision-making required when attempting to measure angles the “correct” way.
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