Overview & Rationale

The first step in planning a problem-centered mathematics lesson is selecting a high cognitive demand tasks. Cognitively demanding tasks encourage multiple solution paths and allow students to draw on various strengths to solve problems. These tasks are at the center of problem-based lessons because they allow you to build on student thinking throughout the lesson.

Step 1: Select a grade level

You will complete this task with your lesson plan group, but together, you’ll choose only one grade level for your lesson. I encourage you to develop a task that you might be able to use in your placement classroom next year, so you might take that into consideration when choosing the grade level.

Step 2: Read through the TN state math standards for your selected grade level

You want to read thoroughly enough to get a sense of what mathematical ideas are appropriate for the grade level you have selected. Together, your group might want to make a list of a few different mathematics topics and ideas that you are interested in incorporating into your lesson. This will help you narrow down your search.

Step 3: Select a high cognitive demand mathematics task

There are lots of great mathematics tasks out there, and it is a more effective use of your time to make good tasks even better than to develop tasks from scratch. In other words, it’s smarter to make use of resources available to you than to try to design your own curriculum! Thus, for this assignment, it is not acceptable for you to create your own task. Instead, you must select a task that is already high cognitive demand or has the potential to be high cognitive demand with only minor adaptations.

CHAPTER 2 in your text provides guidance on selecting an appropriate task and finding high-level tasks. You should revisit these sections of the text as you complete this part of the assignment.

You’re welcome to use whatever resources are available to you, but APPENDIX A in your 5 Practices book provides a list of web-resources for finding high-level tasks and lesson. Here are a few additional recommendations not included in your text:

• https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/
• https://www.weteachnyc.org/
• https://nrich.maths.org/12632
• http://hgse.balancedassessment.org/
• Teaching Children Mathematics available at https://www.lib.utk.edu/
• Teaching Mathematics in the Middle School available at https://www.lib.utk.edu/
• Textbooks from your placement school

Once you’ve selected a task (or a few tasks), solve the task, paying attention to cognitive demand to make sure that it is, in fact, a high cognitive demand math task (refer to Figure 2.3 on p. 21-22 of the Five Practices book to help you with the task analysis). I recommend that your group members solve the task(s) separately. By doing this, you might come up with different ways to solve the task!

Decide on a final task with your group.

Step 4: Check the TN state standards to confirm grade-level appropriateness.

Now that you have a task, take another look at the TN state math standards for your selected grade level. Find 1 or 2 standards that you think are related to your task.