Introduction

Planning a lesson with classroom voting requires many of the same strategies as planning a lesson to be delivered through a lecture. First and foremost, a good lesson plan begins with a clear set of goals, and those goals must be kept in mind as the lesson is developed. Of course, the material must be approached in a logical order. Finally, a bit more flexibility is needed in a classroom voting lesson plan than a traditional lesson plan, since any given discussion can run much longer or shorter than anticipated.

Not too long ago, teaching with classroom voting involved the time-consuming process of writing questions for each class period. Now several people have made their questions available as public libraries (see the links at mathquest. carroll.edu/resources.html), saving the newcomer vast amounts of time. However, working with a large library poses a different set of problems when planning a lesson, in that there are often so many excellent questions that there is not time to use all of them. This, then, leaves us in the familiar situation of having so much that we want to share with our students about a particular topic that we are forced to pick and choose. If we do not choose carefully, then we spend valuable class time on ideas that may be a lot of fun and interesting, but which are not central to our course goals.