Rich Tasks

We haven't been required to post to our journal in a while and to be honest I have been consumed with re-watching all of The Gilmore Girls on Netflix and thus have fallen a bit behind in my math course.  Bad!

I am getting caught up now and this week's focus in on creating rich tasks in a math classroom.  It has been really interesting.  I wish that my teachers had this information when I was a math student.  I would have actually looked forward to math class.

My task for today is to post a list of characteristics of a rich math task.  This has been gleaned from several readings.

Rich math tasks:

• focus on key concepts
• stimulation communication
• captures student interest/engages
• promotes understanding of the concept
• connects to one or more big ideas in the currciulum
• will require that students reason their way to a solution
• allow more than one strategy for arriving at a solution
• require students to explain and justify their thinking about their solution
• don't inlcude information being fed to students in order to do a computation
• encourage student intuition
• has a short question
• lets students ask the questions
• are challenging for most students
• uses contest or situations that are familiar for the students