Week 4 Blog Post

Hello and welcome to this week’s math blog! It’s become quite evident, over the past year and a bit of teacher’s college, that one of the most essential changes made to teaching is the focus on enriching instruction in order to make classroom material more approachable, understandable and engaging for all our students.  One of the methods that can be used to do this was the focus of our classes this past week: Rich Tasks.

In my experiences as a student, when required to differentiate mathematical tasks for learners at different levels of understanding, teachers would often provide questions for the different levels of ‘ability’ of their students. However, not only does this approach not allow for the depth of mathematical understanding and thinking that students will need in their future, but it also completely contradicts the concept of ‘growth mindset’. Using rich tasks in the classroom is a method that teachers can use in order to provide material that is equally accessible for all their students and that allows for depth of understanding.

As per Steve Hewson’s article ‘What is a Mathematically Rich Task?’ (2011), using rich tasks in the classroom provides the opportunity for students to move away from memorizing and attempting to apply mathematical procedures to allowing learners to ‘get inside’ math. According to Hewson this is because rich tasks can enable students to do the following:

• Access and explore math at different levels of understanding
• Make conjectures
• Work successfully when using different methods
• Broaden their problem-solving skills
• Deepen and broaden mathematical content knowledge
• Make sense of underlying principles
• Make connections between different areas of mathematics
• See the role of mathematics within cultural settings      
• See the role of mathematics within cultural settings
   

      These are just a few of the benefits that Hewson listed in his article. Because of this I believe that it is essential for us as teacher to include rich tasks in our teaching as frequently as would benefit our students. In for a task to be considered a ‘rich tasks’ must be accessible to all learners, have real world application, lend itself to a variety of approaches and representation, collaboration/discussion, engagement/curiosity/creativity and opportunities for extension (6 characteristics of Rich Math Tasks by Audet, Lauren (2016)).  

For those of us who will likely need some assistance here are a few helpful links to aid you on journey to enrich your math task:

 1) The nrich.maths.org  website provides a bank of resources for teachers including Rich Mathematical tasks.  

2) The nzmaths.co.nz website also provides rich math tasks for teachers. 

3) Laura Candler's blog gives advice on how to transfer basic word problems into a rich task. 

Here is an example of how to change a basic word problem into a rich task:

Candler, L. (n.d.). [Apple Peeling Problems]. Retrieved September 30, 2018, from https://bit.ly/2Rdv5jG

Thanks for reading and see you next week!