Integrating Rich Tasks - Introduction. This series of professional development resources is designed to support teachers working together, thinking about, and integrating rich tasks into classroom practice. The resources are divided into four phases of development giving time for reflection and practice. They have been designed to be tackled in order but we are aware that colleagues will be starting from different places and may wish to step into and out of the activities according to their particular need. Many of the resources point to supporting documentation offered in Word format, which are linked to the relevant activity. If you prefer to work offline or away from the computer, the CPDComplete.pdf contains all the activities and supporting resources for you to download and/or print.
If you need advice or support with your development programme, members of the NRICH team are available to support you. Phase 1 - Thinking about rich tasks, problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills Activity 1.1 What makes a task rich? Outstanding teaching and great teachers – a whole school CPD approach. In September 2011 our self-evaluation judgement – that we were an outstanding school with outstanding teaching and learning – was confirmed by Ofsted. It was a great endorsement of the work of the school, but was pretty quickly followed by the question, “what now?”
We were facing the same problem that John Tomsett has so eloquently blogged about in “the tricky issue of planning the development of an outstanding school.” Our priority – as at Huntingdon – is to keep the main thing the main thing and continue to develop our outstanding teaching and learning. I believe it is essential that every teacher in every school should aim to be outstanding – what David Didau calls perfection. The approach we have taken is partly born out of the “grace period” that the outstanding judgement has given us; we know that inspectors won’t be knocking on our door this academic year. If there was no OfSTED, no league tables, no SLT… just you and your class..what would you choose to do to make it GREAT? Math.