Integrating rich tasks - Activity 1.2
To go back to the introduction to this series of professional development activities, click here
How can we encourage higher-order thinking skills?
To help to answer this question here are two tasks for you to
do which we hope will help you to:
- distinguish between problems that encourage higher-order thinking skills and problems which don't
- develop problems of your own that support higher-order thinking skills
In this activity we shall focus on what we are looking for in
our pupils when they are engaged in using higher-order thinking
skills (HOTS).
You will need the following resources:
The first task-
The cards in HOTS1.doc contain some lower-order questions and, focusing on the same mathematical topic, some more challenging questions - ones that require higher-order thinking skills. Pair them up.
- Now, with colleagues, answer the following questions:
-
- What do you think higher-order thinking skills are?
- What do tasks that encourage higher-order thinking skills look like?
- Look at these notes on higher-order thinking skills and compare them with your ideas. Are there any major differences? What is your response to those differences?
The
second task
- Instead of replacing a lower-order problem with a different problem, we can often modify it. How can we adapt lower-order maths problems so they promote HOTS? HOTS2.doc outlines four key strategies that will help to increase the challenge of standard questions in the classroom:
-
- Here's the answer, what could the question be?
- Make up your own ...
- What if ...?
- All answers
- Look at a problem you have recently set one of your classes and discuss how it could be transformed into one requiring higher-order thinking skills. Jot down your ideas and keep them for Activity 2.2 .
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