Abstract
This article offers reflections on task design in the context of a Grade R (reception year) in-service numeracy project in South Africa. The research explores under what conditions, and for what learning purpose, a task designed by someone else may be recast and how varying given task specifications may support or inhibit learning, as a result of that recasting. This question is situated within a two-pronged task design challenge as to emerging gaps between the task designer’s intentions and teacher’s actions and secondly between the teachers’ intentions and students’ actions. Through analysing two teachers and their respective Grade R students’ interpretations of a worksheet task, provided to teachers in the project, we illuminate the way explicit constraints, in the form of task specifications, can be both enabling and constraining of learning. In so doing we recast this ‘double gap’ as enabling productive learning spaces for teacher educators, teachers and students.
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Notes
By Theo LeSieg & Roy McKie. Published by Beginner Books.
Dialogic reading involves multiple readings and conversations about books with strategic questioning and responding to children (Doyle and Bramwell 2006).
A similar book ‘5 children under umbrellas’ was later given to teachers hence the interchange in talk of trees and umbrellas.
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Graven, M., Coles, A. Resisting the desire for the unambiguous: productive gaps in researcher, teacher and student interpretations of a number story task. ZDM Mathematics Education 49, 881–893 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-017-0863-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-017-0863-7