Remember that game we played at the beginning of class on Monday? Where you were given a number and you had to say “I am (number), who is (problem)”? This game is used to encourage students to think and participate in math class. Calculators are not permitted to be used during this game. Furthermore, you may recall that we played the same game in last year’s math class except we used different questions.
Parallel tasks gives choices which will have your students want to participate. Reading both questions may help the student to better understand the problems. They are also beneficial because it provides your students with a productive task to complete, while encouraging critical thinking. In addition, parallel tasks allow your students to work at their level.
If students choose a challenging question, let them. There is a good chance they may go back and choose another question. But if a student chooses a question that is too easy, have them come up with multiple answers or assign them a second question. This relates to our online math mindset module this week, where we learn about math and speed. We want to encourage deeper thinking, so give your students a challenge to help develop brain growth.
In addition, one way to encourage deeper thinking is by providing parallel tasks in a group setting. We witnessed this in this week’s class, where we were put into groups, and given a number of parallel tasks to choose from. Once completing the tasks, we were to participate in a gallery walk, making suggestions on other group’s work and/or mentioning things that we liked about what they came up with. This is something we have done in other classes such as Social Studies in year 1, though I never experienced this during placement. I would definitely like to take more initiative in placement and ask my associate if they would be willing to allow for the class to participate in an activity like this one. The question that my group decided upon, out of all the questions Patricia provided us was:
Choose one of the measurements below. About how many years old is something that is as old as the measurement you chose?
-
1000 days
-
10 000 hours
-
1 000 000 seconds
Below is a picture of the chart that my group came up with.
Another parallel task was the question we answered about jeans. This is the question I chose to answer: “Jamie paid 80% as much as Juliana for her jeans. If Juliana paid less than $50, how much might each have paid?” Below is how I solved the question. How did you solve it?
Since I am someone who enjoys shopping, the first thing that came to mind was adding tax to the pair of jeans. I would not expect the same from my student’s, though I would be highly impressed if anyone in the junior or intermediate level thought to do that.
On a side note kids like when you include them in problem. You can do this simply by having their names within the questions. Did you notice how Patricia included my name in addition to another student teacher’s name in the math problem? This was also done within the parallel tasks group table questions too!
Additional Resources
Next week we will be discussing rich tasks. If you would like to get a jump start on looking into some rich tasks resources for mathematics, feel free to visit the following websites that I was provided with during my first teaching placement:
Hey Jamie,
ReplyDeleteYou should definitely try a gallery walk in your placement. We did one in math during my placement and it worked really well. The students enjoyed the activity and I think it helped them think deeper about the math problem because they got to go around and see other people's work (luckily the answers were quite diverse so there was room for discussion about what worked for some students but not others).
I like your point about parallel tasks that it gives students the freedom to be brave. There's no pressure if they start one problem, get stuck and would like to switch. Sometimes just knowing you have the option to do something else is enough to make students feel more at ease.
Teaching students about percents like with the shopping problem we did in class is definitely a good idea. When I worked in retail you'd be amazed how many people struggled with calculating deals. And I'm not talking about some weird number like 33% off, but something like 50% off and customers would still ask me what 50% of $24.50 was! I blame lack of continued math practice and lack of practical problems in school. Hopefully we can change that a bit when we're out in the field!
Hi Jamie,
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I really liked how you touched on letting the students choose which question they will work on for parallel tasks. By providing students with choice, we are differentiating for our students. I also agree with you that using parallel tasks in group settings encourage deeper thinking. Collaboration with others for open-ended type questions provides students with rich discussions, questioning and meaningful learning experiences. When we did this activity in groups during class, many members of my group suggested or considered something different than what I was thinking. This helped me see different ways of solving the same problem allowing me to think critically.