We all want our students thinking deeply about math ideas, exploring concepts, connecting their procedural knowledge to conceptual understanding, and feeling highly engaged in authentic mathematical learning. Well-developed tasks will help generate this kind of thinking and support these goals. However, designing such tasks is not easy.

This ongoing program will create a community of learners and teachers that will explore the concepts of good task design, and support each other in building a foundation for how to think about creating activities to support students’ mathematical thinking. We will design mathematical tasks together, try them in our classrooms, report back on successes and failures, and participate in an iterative process of creating and recreating activities to best illicit the kind of engagement and mathematical thinking we want from our students. In the spring, we will take site visits to observe each other in teaching the tasks we design to see how they play out in different environments.

Our professional learning community is designed to support all teachers, ranging from those who design their own curriculum to those whose curriculum is largely established, but are  looking to develop more engaging approaches to some of their lessons. Though all math teachers are welcome, content will be oriented toward those teaching fifth-ninth grade, with a strong focus on the middle school setting.