It has been so motivating reading and seeing all the fantastic HMW questions this season, and I wanted to finally take some time to share mine and the work I have been doing, as well as my plans for the rest of the current school year and on.
This year my HMW has to do with creating ways to address a large ability gap I have found in my math class. As I see this continuing to be a trend as we move through the years post Covid I wanted to ensure I build in some strong practices that help all my students. To do this I have decided to expand out more of my math assignments and to explore the concept of tiered assessments. None of these are new concepts and I am not reinventing the wheel, but I want to improve in this area. Differentiating and providing more choice in my math class is also something that fills my bucket.
To that end, I’ve decided to begin with a tiered thinking task that I will be trying out in my class. The assignment itself will have 3 levels of challenge. Level 1’s challenge is to reach 8 points and in doing this all of my students will complete the curriculum standards I need to cover. From there they can also try challenge 2- to get 12 points, then challenge 3 to complete all the questions. Each question is worth different points depending on it’s difficulty and novelty.
Below I have included some examples of problems. Some being simple one and two step equations, and some being ones I took and tweaked from Jo Boaler that are outside the box and engaging. From there I’m giving my students a survey to assess things such as the challenge level they chose, why they chose it as well as their confidence when tackling the problems.
In this I’m hoping to dig deeper into 
missed concepts as well as address a potential lack of confidence in my students.
My goal is to do 2-3 more of these assessments and surveys before the end of the year. This combined with student survey data will allow me to see if I have begun to bridge some gaps or at least identify how much of it might be math anxiety or a gap caused by remote learning.
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also am curious to see how many students will try challenges they normally would not pursue as they get more comfortable with this type of assessment practice.
I’m excited to see where this will go in my math class!