PLCs, sharing ideas, creating lessons and Statistics

I just want to share how much I love my PLC group.  In our school we do PLCs by content area.  We are a small school so we have 2 math teachers, 2 science teachers, 1 STEM teacher, and a special education teacher.  We meet about every other week for 1.5 hours.  It is always an amazing experience.

2 meetings ago, I went in to develop a lesson on mean and median.  I mentioned how I always struggle with students realizing how an outlier can effect mean much more than median.  Through discussion and brainstorming we came up with a great idea using blocks, a meter stick, and a balance point.  This lesson would have never come together the way it did without my PLC group.

The lesson involved creating sets of data with a mean of 50.  A meter stick was then balanced and blocks were placed at the data points to create a balance.  Students were asked to put on an "outlier" block and recalculate the mean and median.

This activity was also used to visualize missing data point problems with a given mean.  Students placed blocks on the meter stick and saw how it didn't balance.  Then they were asked to place a block so the meter stick would balance at 50 (have a mean of 50).

A quick bare-bones handout can be found here.