Week 3 Reflection

Parallel Tasks 

      Welcome back everyone for my week three reflection of my math blog!

      This week our focus was teaching mathematics for all learners. In order to reach all learners one might take into account instructional considerations. One of these considerations that really stuck out to me was to promote engagement. There were 7 golden rules for engaging students which included: 1. Make it Meaningful
2. Foster a Sense of Competence
3. Provide Autonomy Support
4. Embrace Collaborative Learning
5. Establish Positive Teacher-Student Relationships
6. Promote Mastery Orientations
7. Add effective technology

      We have talked a lot about making math meaningful and to do that you must engage the students in the lesson. There are many ways in which us as teachers can make math meaningful to help reach all learners. This week we focused a lot on differentiating the content in the form of parallel tasks. Parallel tasks allow for a variety of skill levels to work on the same problem in a manner that supports them. These problems offer a low floor and high ceiling which allow all students to engage in learning and are able to participate and learn from each other.

Open-ended and Parallel Tasks


 
Differentiating Mathematics Instruction 5 - Open-Ended and Parallel Learning Tasks for Instruction from The Learning Exchange (1) on Vimeo.

As we saw from the video, parallel tasks are sets of two or three tasks that are designed to met the needs of students at different levels, but are tasks that get at the same big idea and are close enough in context to one another that they can be discussed simultaneously. Below is an example of a parallel task.

Choice 1: There were 583 students in Amy’s school in the morning. 99 of the grade 4 students left for a field trip. How many students are left in the school?

Choice 2: There are 61 grade 4 students in Amy’s school. 19 of them are in the library. How many grade 4 students are left in their classrooms?

    

    This example provides one choice suitable for students ready to work with three digit numbers and a parallel task for students to work with smaller numbers. The strategic choice of the tasks still permits a meaningful class discussion that includes mathematical thinking generated from the parallel tasks.

            In a class discussion, both choices can be discussed at once by using effective questioning and prompting. Some sample questions that can be used include:

-How do you know that most of the students were left?

-Why does subtracting make sense?

-How would your answer have changed if more students have left?

Through questioning and sharing of answers through different students’ approaches, students gain the guidance they need to respond independently to tasks that were previously too difficult for them to work alone.

The ultimate goal of differentiation is to meet the needs of all the students in a classroom during all parts of the problem solving lesson. Parallel tasks make this more manageable for it allows a single task to be given to students at different stages of mathematical development and for all learners to grow mathematically. Each student is able to become a contributing and valued member of the classroom learning community.