The Value of Rich Math Tasks

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If I showed you the image on the right and told you that any of the four quadrants could be a correct answer to the question of which one doesn't belong, how would you feel? Would you challenge yourself to find more than one answer or would you wish that I had told you that there was only one correct answer to find?

The "Which One Doesn't Belong?" activity from this week's class emphasized the importance of breaking the stereotype that math involves only one right answer. As the article What is a Mathematically Rich Task? emphasizes, when we integrate more open, rich, and meaningful math problems into our math classrooms, it creates a "far more interesting, engaging, and powerful" learning experience for our students.

Rich Math Tasks: What Are They?

In order to integrate rich math tasks into the classroom, it is important to understand what they are. The articles Rich Tasks and Content and 6 Characteristics of Rich Math Tasks were valuable in helping me to understand the following key components of rich math tasks so that I had a better understanding and awareness of how to create and include them in my unit plan and future classroom.

1) Accessible to a Wide Range of Learners
The struggling student, the advanced student, and every student in between should see the task as challenging yet doable and should feel that they have the opportunity to contribute to the task with confidence.

2) Situated in a Real-Life Context
The task needs to be authentic and relevant to our students' lives so that they develop an interest in and understanding of how math applies to the real world around them.

3) Allows for a Variety of Approaches and Representations
As we create rich tasks, it is important to recognize, respect, and embrace students' diverse learning styles and approaches to problem solving.

4) Promotes Collaboration and Discussion
Rich tasks encourage students to share and compare their strategies, reasoning, and responses in order gain new insights and perspectives as they develop their mathematical understanding.

5) Fosters Students' Creativity
Rich tasks promote creativity and imaginative thinking as students use a variety of strategies and approaches to work through challenging problems.

6) Includes Opportunities for Challenges and Extensions
It is also important for there to be a potential to extend the task for more advanced students so that the other students can continue to work through the problem without feeling pressured to finish quickly.

© Pat McEachren. 2017.

Rich Math Tasks: Why Include Them?

While there are many benefits to integrating rich math tasks into the classroom, I would like to focus on two key benefits that really stood out to me throughout this week's content.

Students Develop a Deeper Understanding of Math

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As the Math Mindset modules this week emphasized, if we want our students to become successful mathematicians, we need to give them opportunities to collaborate, reason, and make connections so that they can develop a deeper understanding of math. Through rich math tasks, students have the opportunity to share and compare their strategies, ideas, and answers with their peers, to explain and justify their methods and choices, and to make meaningful connections to other math concepts and the real world. Rich math tasks help to prevent students from thinking that math is a frustrating subject that deals with a series of isolated concepts and that always involves using one right method to quickly find one right answer. As a teacher, it is easy to feel pressured to rush through tasks and activities in order to get through all the curriculum content, but developing rich math tasks and giving students time to collaborate, reason, and build connections is key to building a rich and positive learning environment where students build deep mathematical understanding.


Students Feel Empowered and Engaged
Rich math tasks are also valuable in helping students to become empowered and engaged learners. Our webinar this week focused on Differentiated Instruction and the importance of ensuring that all of the diverse learners in our classroom feel valued, included, and capable of achieving success. Rich tasks respect and promote diversity as students are encouraged to use a variety of methods and approaches to solve the problem and to share their strategies and ideas with their peers, ensuring that students of all levels feel that they are valued contributors to the learning taking place in their classroom.

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Rich tasks can also be key in building a sense of community where students feel that the teacher knows them and cares about them. When rich tasks incorporate students' names and interests and aspects of the teacher's life, the tasks become much more personal and students feel a sense of belonging. During my placement, I created a problem that involved my brother who owned a sailboat. The students loved the fact that I shared this information and a story about my own experience sailing for the first time with them and I could even see the level of engagement increase. In my future lesson plans, I will definitely make the rich tasks personal to our classroom so that students feel valued and see math as fun and meaningful.

© Belinda Olij. 2016.