Keeping your Students Engaged through Rich Tasks

Want to keep your students engaged? One way to keep them engaged all year round is through mutual celebrations. Kids like when you celebrate everything because it shows them that what is important to them is also important to you. We should encourage our students to share, so that we can all celebrate with them, in order to show them that it is something important and worth celebrating to everyone. I wonder, did any of you celebrate with your students during your placement? What types of things did you celebrate? I know at my placement, we celebrated the students birthdays by having the students sit in the teacher’s chair at the front of the classroom, while everyone in the classroom sang them happy birthday

What are some other ways to keep students engaged in the classroom though? How can we keep students engaged in mathematics, knowing that not all students may enjoy math?

Dan Meyer Talk at Cambridge NRICH/PRIMAS day

Kids like when you include your real life into the math problems. When discussing the ski jump and slope, Patricia included her personal story about skiing, with herself and her family. Therefore, even though she was discussing a good resource to refer to (Dan Myers videos), she was able to include her own personal life into the problem to keep students interested, as some of us who took the class with her last year had already known about the video reference. Side note, Patricia not only included her own personal life in the example, she also included her previous class from the year before by bringing our class into the example. This helps to keep students engaged because it allows them to jog their memory to recall the example provided last year, that we are now referring to again this year.

Another way to keep your students engaged is through rich tasks activities. We participated in multiple rich tasks activities this week, though this one was our minds on activity. The activity involved solving a problem that suggested a classroom of 24 students during lunchtime. Half of the students play soccer, a quarter of the students play on the adventure playground, a sixth of the students sit around and the remainder play tag. Then you are asked to add the teacher to the group that sits around during lunchtime. This is how my table group solved it:

Tips to consider when introducing rich tasks into our classroom:

• Opportunities for extension – kids might like the problem they are working on, so you can keep them engaged by extending the problem when needed.
• Give students time to complete the tasks so that everyone is able to try to solve the problem, rather than getting the answer from someone else. There may be students who need to finish the problem and could get upset or flustered if they are not given the time to complete the question.
• These tasks need to be in the middle of your lesson to allow students the time to complete them.
• Students can learn from each other because they are working together. They may start the problem differently, which again, can allow for students to learn from others. We see this in the Math Mindset Module this week too with the question 18x5. We all had our own way of solving it, some solving it the same way others did, while others solved it in a way that we may not have ever thought to solve the equation. Whether through the video or our fellow teacher candidates’ forum posts, I’m sure that we can all agree that we learned something from this problem.

I leave you with this question, one that has come up in class this week. What makes a rich task? You may wish to refer to my blog from last week if you would like to collect resources for rich tasks for mathematics.