Low Threshold High Ceiling

Everyone has the right to succeed and everyone has the right to struggle

To complement this guidance, we hosted two teacher webinars. You may wish to watch the recording/s before or after taking a look at the guidance below.

The low threshold means that everyone has the opportunity to be successful, and the high ceiling means that everyone has the opportunity to be challenged. 

We are wanting to nurture curious mathematicians, so we can model using accessible starting points as a springboard for asking interesting mathematical questions.

Low threshold high ceiling (LTHC) tasks often have some of the following characteristics:

• are accessible to a wide range of learners
• draw learners in with an intriguing starting point or intriguing initial discoveries
• offer opportunities for initial success
• challenge learners to think for themselves
• offer learners opportunities to explain and justify observations, conjectures and insights
• offer different levels of challenge
• allow learners to pose their own questions
• allow for different methods and a variety of responses
• offer opportunities to identify elegant or efficient solutions
• have the potential to broaden learners' skills or deepen their mathematical understanding
• encourage creativity and imaginative application of knowledge
• have the potential for revealing patterns or leading to generalisations
• encourage collaboration and discussion
• encourage learners to develop confidence and independence 

To draw out the richness of these tasks, it is important to think about the pedagogy. John Mason suggests that it is not the task itself that is rich, but whether the task is used richly. 

To find out more, you may like to read these two articles, which contain a few example tasks:

Low Threshold High Ceiling - An Introduction
Creating a Low Threshold High Ceiling Classroom