Reflection of "What-If-Not"

“What-IF-Not” is a good problem posing strategy that can be used after choosing a starting point and listing the possible attributes. When the problems are posted, analyzing problems will be the last step. Next week, in our microteaching, we are going to talk about trigonometry. I am not sure if it is possible for us to use WIN in our microteaching class because it is just 15 minutes, and we might not have time to use WIN and ask question deeper and deeper. However, we still can assume that if we have enough time, we will ask students to solve a triangle. In the first step, we might let students try to find different ways to solve a triangle based on the givens. For example, in a right triangle, the students might find an angle by subtracting another acute angle. Then, we would like to ask the students what if it is not allowed to use subtraction to solve the problem and ask them to try to use trigonometry.

Strength:
• Helping open people mind and makes people think a mathematic topic deeply.
• Leading people to combine their knowledge together to solve a problem.
• Engaging the students who really like math and would like to try different way to approach a mathematic topic

Weakness:
• Might cause the students who have basic knowledge of math to get bored.
• Not fit a microteaching because it costs a lot of time to post problems and analyze them.
• Really depends on the students’ level and their interest. I think it might be used with grade 11 and grade 12 students in a secondary school because the grade 8 to 10 students maybe not have the ability to analyze these kind of questions