When you get into the quadratics unit of Algebra, teaching average rate of change is soon to be in your lesson plans.

Here are some suggestions for making it easier for you and better for your students.

Warm Up with Slope Formula

Don’t go into the lesson with students who are “cold” on the slope formula!  

Open class with a warm up or bell ringer that asks students to find the slope…given two points or given a graph…or both.

Here’s one I made just as a super simple warmup. Feel free to right click and save it or get the free pdf download here.

Provide students with the formula or wait until they’ve had time to reason a bit first.  Maybe you’ll wait until you have a class discussion. 

You know your kids best.

Here are a couple of ideas for extending the warm up…


This way, they’re reminded of what they know from the linear unit when you get to the next step of the lesson.

Provide Real-life Applications for the Concept

Here’s a great exploration on Desmos.  

It provides for discovery and gives students a chance to test ideas as they move the sliders or play the demonstration.

It also allows students to complete several problems, so this may replace or supplement your “notes/lecture” time during class.

Great for working in small groups or pairs as well.

Use a Pre-Made Assessment

This assessment is just 5 questions, so it’s perfect for using as a homework check, ticket out the door/exit ticket, or combined with the others in this bundle for a test review.  

One of the things I like best about this is that the answers are not simply 4 multiple choice ones that are more obvious…

It has a dropdown of answer choices ranging from -5 to 5, for instance.

Here’s the “teacher side” of the Google Form:

And here’s the “student side” of the assessment:

I think this provides a better assessment of understanding than just four choices that students may be good at guessing.

The answers are editable, though, so if you’d like to have fewer answer choices or change them completely, you can do that, too.

The other thing that’s great about it…is that it’s already done

I’ve already checked and re-checked the problems, thought purposely about the range of problems to provide, designed the settings for what seems to be most commonly used in high school math classrooms.

{This video shows exactly what those settings are.}

What else do you love to use when teaching average rate of change with quadratics?  DM me on Instagram to tell me!

I hope this helps!  

You’ve got this!