Day 4, July 9, 2015
Open Questions, Parallel Tasks
Engaged and competent students and developing independent thinkers is a commitment to our students and to our profession. We continuously look for ways and means to
achieve these goals. The activities and
assignments we did on open questions and parallel tasks partly fulfill my quest
for strategies to help me develop thinkers in my classroom. The discussions help me re-asses my belief on
how student learn: that students should
work on the same problem at the same time, and that each math question has have
a single answer, (an answer that should match with what I know).
Now, I know why my long term assignment in an inner-city school went
wrong. Not too many months ago, I have had
to manage math classes in Grade 11 Applied, Grade 11 Essentials and Grade 10
Applied. For each of these course, my
daily routine was to explain the lessons, ask questions, do some examples and
prepare students for the weekly quizzes and the unit tests. The results are frustrating for both the
students and myself. Differentiation is
always what I thought I could have done to help my students. However, the only strategies I manage to
implement are differentiating students’ product and individually tutoring those
who are struggling.
A prior knowledge and application on open questions and parallel tasks could
have helped me achieve student success in those courses. Today, I have learned that open questions:
- · Reinforce a wide range of math concepts. They require more thinking, less computational and students don’t need to memorize shortcut tricks.
- · Provide choice, one of the elements implicit in differentiated instruction. They have multiple –entries and students can answer in a way that’s is suitable for their level.
- · Everyone benefits from different perspective when they hear other students respond, then everybody gets loved in math class.
- · Challenging and yet enriching and accessible to all.
- · Allow students to learn “how to think” rather than “what to think” and to eventually become independent thinkers.
Open questions and parallel tasks will definitely be part of my
differentiating instruction and my three-part lessons. One of the requirements of differentiating
instruction is to consider the needs of each student at his or her current
stage of development. Open questions provide
those choice that urges student to think and defend his or he answer rather
than just finding that one right answer.
Open questions will also be a better “minds-on” activity or a diagnostic
tool to understand the learner’s prior knowledge. I can also incorporate open questions and parallel
tasks into my lessons as assessment “as” learning strategy.
If I my intention is to develop independent learners in my classroom, I
should foster Dr. Marian Small’s idea of
allowing students to think differently than I do, to provide them different choices on how to answer questions
in a manner that is suitable to their level of development. If I can offer more meaningful activities
through open questions and parallel tasks, then I will have engaged, confident,
competent students who will likewise enjoy learning math.
Great post Jesse. I agree with you, this article and lesson gave us time to reflect on our past practices. I too feel like I concentrated on many "closed question" instead of focusing my lessons on "open questions" and can see the benefit of using the second type of method to guide our students into becoming critical thinkers. I believe using both methods allows us to create balanced lessons, and to give every student the opportunity to feel successful and less anxious about learning Mathematics.
ReplyDeleteV.
Hi Jesse
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your reflection. I think it's important for all teachers to reflect back on their teaching practices and modify them for the future as new ideologies and teaching strategies will change to support new research and changes in society. I like your reference to Marian Small; I think teachers tend to teach how content how they understand it and what is comfortable to them, however not everyone learns the same and that is why parallel tasks and open ended questions are so important.
Open questions definitely provide us with a lot more opportunities to challenge students with engaging math activities, while also allowing for differentiated instruction. Closed questions might be useful in the context of building particular operational skills that students have not yet had the chance to practice, but should not be used after that phase. Excessive focus on closed questions leads to a lack of curiosity in mathematical reasoning.
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