K-5 Task Examples

Today I am doing a workshop using Margaret Smith and Mary Kay Stein’s book 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions.   There are 5 (plus 0) practices that teachers need to do when planning a lesson that they want to have a good mathematical discussion about.

0. Setting Goals and Selecting Tasks – setting goals to ensure that a discussion will be productive and selecting a task that has the potential to help students achieve those goals

1. Anticipating likely student responses to challenging mathematical tasks

2. Monitoring students’ actual responses to the tasks (while students work on the tasks in pairs or small groups)

3. Selecting particular students to present their mathematical work during the whole-class discussion

4. Sequencing the student responses that will be displayed in a specific order

5. Connecting different students’ responses and connecting the responses to key mathematical ideas

In the workshop we spent a lot of time Anticipating.  I gave the teachers tasks from each grade level (K-5) and asked them to Anticipate possible student strategies.  Below it shows one of the 3rd grade tasks, but it links to all the tasks.  Each group was given a particular task and asked to Select, Sequence, and Connect and then share it out with the whole group.