Week 4 Blog

For this week’s class we were responsible for reading two resources that were focused on creating and administering mathematically rich tasks to the students in your math class. The resources were found on the website NRICH and were very informative regarding what exactly is a Rich Task, and the benefits they have when presented to students as opposed to the more traditional tasks of the past.  In Monday’s class we covered some great concepts and went over what it is to create rich mathematical tasks. Some of the important information that I recorded was that Rich tasks provide students with multiple starting points, which allow for students to jump in and start wherever they feel most comfortable. In addition, there are usually extensions within the problems, meaning that there is usually a second part to the question where you have to use the information found out in the first part, to solve the second part. Another concept that we covered that goes hand in hand with Rich tasks are open tasks. Open tasks are tasks that do not have one exclusive right answer. These types of questions allow students to work on their intuition, reasoning, and logical thinking skills; as long as the students can support their answer logically in an open question, they are right. I thought that there was one quote from the, “What is a Mathematically Rich Task,” resource that did a great job of summarizing what a Rich Task is.

“Rich tasks open up mathematics. They transform the subject from a collection of memorised procedures and facts into a living, connected whole. Rich tasks allow the learner to 'get inside' the mathematics. The resulting learning process is far more interesting, engaging and powerful; it is also far more likely to lead to a lasting assimilation of the material for use in both further mathematical study and the wider context of applications.”

This quote leads perfectly into the videos that we had to watch for this week’s online module. The main point in one of the videos is that math is really only built upon a small number of main concepts. And it is upon these main concepts that all other advanced math is based off of. Therefore, if we are able to teach out students to grasp these few main ideas or key concepts, then when they move forward in their academic career they have a strong base and knowledge upon which they can build. The understanding of these main key concepts, also allows students to be able to think intuitively about math. This was another video that we had to watch online this week. Intuition is a major part of everyday life math as well as math in the classroom, it deals with proportional reasoning and logical thinking, and is a skill that is essential for success in math; it allows us to make quick judgments and estimations about math, which help us in solving the problems. Implementing Rich Open tasks in the math classroom places the importance on Enduring understanding. We, as teachers, need to be moving towards implementing more open and mathematically rich tasks in the classroom, rather than the black and white traditional problems that many of us experienced during our early academic careers.

            This week Adriana and Kathlene ran their Webinar on differentiated instruction.

Diff. Instruction. [online image] 2014, http://bit.ly/2dK0jLW

I think that the two of them did a great job at running the webinar and providing good insight into implementing DI in the Math classroom. However, I have been finding that these online webinars are very unreliable and whether it be audio or video issues there almost always seems to be some sort of issue in the process of carrying a webinar out. That being said, the two ladies did a great job of carrying on throughout the technical difficulties and were able to think quickly on their feet to fix the problems.