GW Exam

Overview & Rationale

“Good” lessons and tasks - ones that allow for multiple solution strategies & support students to explore and reason - are a great start for supporting every student to actively engage and learn math. But "good" lessons/tasks aren't enough to address status issues that can limit students' access and learning in math, especially for small group work. As a teacher, it is important for you to understand how to adapt math lessons and tasks to foster productive group work, so that students have opportunities to learn from their peers and from diverse perspectives. In this exam, you’ll have a chance to demonstrate your ability to develop a groupworthy math task by adapting an existing lesson or task.

Groups

Activities

Group "test" completed during class in Week 8

Your group will be given a "good" task that can be adapted for more effective collaborative learning. You will have two hours to:

Solve the task in a way that you anticipate students would
Identify the central mathematical focus of the task and relevant state standard(s) for the given grade level
Analyze the "groupworthiness" of the task, as written, along the six criteria for groupworthy tasks that we have discussed in class and read about. NOTE: "Groupworthiness" is not an all or nothing thing. So you might find that the task already has some features of groupworthy tasks but lacks others. There could also be room for improvement with existing groupworthy features.
Suggest adaptations to increase the "groupworthiness" of the task. NOTE: You do not have to make those adaptations during this time. But you do have to describe the adaptation and tell me how you think those adaptations will increase the groupworthiness of the task (i.e., improve upon existing or add additional groupworthy features).

How to Prepare & Rubric

Learning Objectives

Demonstrate knowledge of mathematics concepts, practices, and curriculum:

You can describe the key concepts necessary for the development of geometry concepts.
You can analyze & interpret mathematics curriculum materials and standards documents to identify central mathematical ideas relevant to a specific grade-level.

Demonstrate pedagogical knowledge and practices for teaching mathematics:

You can adapt tasks for collaborative learning that draw on structures and features proven to effectively support the learning of mathematics by each student.

Demonstrate knowledge of students as learners of mathematics:

You can anticipate student approaches to rich mathematics problems, including both conventional and unconventional strategies, and you can relate those strategies to the mathematical concepts students are learning.

Demonstrate awareness of social contexts of mathematics teaching and learning:

You seek to actively position all learners as mathematical doers by explicitly identifying a range of abilities that students draw on to contribute to mathematical work of group tasks.

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