Blog Post #8: Teach Rich Task Reflection

Personal Learning for Teach Rich Task

1.      Difficulty in locating a Rich Task Activity

      As I was researching online, attempting to locate an appropriate activity that challenged students to use logic and reasoning to solve a real-world problem, I found it extremely difficult. The majority of the lesson plans that I was readily able to find were the traditional textbook, cookie cutter type of lesson plans that did little for students other than asking them to memorize a procedure and replicate that procedure multiple times. These lessons did not seek for students to reach high level thinking or even to engage students in an interesting lesson concept. I finally found a specific story problem that met the above criteria and decided to build a lesson plan around that particular problem rather than spending hours and hours looking for a pre-made lesson plan that did not measure up.

2.      Different ideas of what is a Rich Task Activity

      My group members and I were not always on the same page as to what constituted a rich task activity and what did not. A rich task activity in my perspective is a lesson that is hands-on, engaging, and requires students to think outside the box in order to come to solution. Students should be challenged by exploration and discovery on their own rather than the teacher simply providing the students with a formula or a step-by-step procedure. The rich task activity that my group chose had the potential to meet these criteria but my group members were fairly satisfied with the lesson plan as-is. I believed that this lesson plan could have been at least slightly improved by making it more interactive and student generated.

3.      Challenges for Gifted Students

      Even after reading the helpful hints on Sakai about ways to challenge gifted students in the same lesson, my group members and I found it difficult to decide on how to challenge gifted students for our particular lesson. The original ideas for this section of the lesson plan included asking the gifted students to help out the other students in the classroom who were struggling or to provide the gifted students more challenging questions at the end of the lesson. Both of these ideas were directed stated in the helpful hint worksheet as two things not to do for gifted students so it was back to the drawing board.

4.      Teaching Peers

      Though I have been asked to teach lessons in front of my peers every semester at Bradley, it is still a different dynamic than teaching children of the appropriate grade level as the lesson. I find teaching my peers to be an even more daunting task than teaching children the same lesson because mistakes are more easily noticeable and it is difficult to treat my peers as though they were years younger.

5.      Other Group Presentations

      The group presentations presented by my other classmates were much more informal than I was expecting when preparing for my own presentation. The majority of the lessons presented were described to the class in the teacher perspective rather than presented as if to a group of students. One group, due to weather conditions, was not even able to present part of their lesson so they ended up describing what they would have done with a group of students instead. The lesson that my group and I presented seemed to be the closest presentation of an actual lesson to a group of students.