Math and science are not easy subject. Both need focus and practice to be understood. Students need to engage in tasks to learn, otherwise they keep memorizing rules and use numbers that doesn't make any sense to them; or just be lost, and these periods will be their nightmares. Students need to explore, understand, then explain and reason to learn. I used to tell my students " I can't grade your brain"; you need to speak up your thoughts, or write something on a paper. I really need to know what is in these brains to help them.
To ensure that students will engage, we need to select a suitable task to work on. One of the examples in 5 practice book is the staircase task. The students worked in groups to find how many small square will be in 5th stage. The teacher gave the task before she is starting her new lesson. It was a formative assessment to know how her students can use their previous knowledge to find a pathway can help in solving this task. Formative assessment is a great tool we can use to figure out what we need to teach or what may focus on. The task use a visual model which can help them to find out the pattern and use it for the next stage. It also ask to find a function, which is the rule for this problem. It is really important to monitor the students work and listen to their ideas and thought. Sometimes asking question lead the students to dig deep in the concept. The next step is to open the public discussion. This is what happened in this scenario. She asked Nylea to start explaining how and why she got this result, and this encourage other students to argue, agree or suggest other idea.
As educators we need to listen to our students to know what they need to hear from us!