Developing Concepts Through Rich Tasks
Welcome back everybody to week 4 of my math blog.
This week we largely focused on
the idea of rich tasks and the importance of incorporating them into our math
lessons.
When we hear the term ‘math’, one
may typically think it to be a subject of a collection of memorized procedures,
facts and formulas. As teachers, we are trying to steer our students away from
that mentality and make math meaningful and exciting to them. One method of
achieving this is to incorporate rich tasks in math lessons. Rich tasks open up
mathematics. They take the subject from dull and meticulous and transform it into
a loving and connected whole. Rich tasks allow the students to really get
inside the subject and understand it is a more interesting, engaging and
powerful way that will lead to lasting assimilation of the material.
Diane Briars, the president of
the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, describes math tasks as “the
vehicle for mathematical learning”. She describes how it is important to offer
students daily opportunities to engage in the kind of tasks that require
reasoning and problem solving. The video below shares some ideas Diane Briars
has on rich math talks.
Rich math tasks encourage
children to “think creatively, work logically, communicate ideas, synthesis
their results, analyse different viewpoints, look for commonalities and
evaluate findings. However, what we really need are rich classrooms:
communities of enquiry and collaboration, promoting communication and
imagination” (NRICH, 2011). In our class, we looked at a lot of good examples
of rich tasks. Below is an example of a task:
You can represent a certain
amount of money with exactly 6 identical coins.
How do I know nobody would say
$1.00?
Why is the number you said an
even number?
This problem can be seen as a
rich task for it is:
-accessible to all learners as it
provides interest, motivation and a challenge to all learners.
-involving real life connections
which make it authentic and meaningful.
-allowing for multiple approaches
and representations
-allowing for collaboration and
discussion
-provides for engagement,
curiosity, and creativity.
-allowing for opportunities for
extension and parallel tasks.
I took a look at my fellow colleague Sabrina's blog this week and really liked the video "Best Practices: Math Effective Classes" that she shared. The video displays students working on a open-ended an rich math task where they are engaged, collaborating, curious and making connections. As Sabrina mentioned, the students truly look happy while they are learning and they are so consumed in the task at hand that they actually forget that they are learning something. Below is the video that Sabrina found.
After my experience of my first teaching block, I found how important it is to allow students to experience rich math tasks and open ended questions. The amount of learning and engagement that came out of these sort of questions was far superior than handing out a worksheet full of questions. When I am teaching my own math class I would not want all the students to quietly be doing their work at their desks with just a pencil and paper. Instead, I want them to be working together, making connections, and be excited about math. Providing rich tasks can allow me to achieve this goal in my own class and help make math fun and meaningful to my students.
