Supporting teachers in choosing and using challenging mathematics tasks

The research reported here was motivated by curiosity about ways of suggesting tasks and activities to teachers that assist them in their planning and which allow them to see the purpose of the suggested tasks. A group of junior secondary teachers involved in a larger project worked through a set of tasks that sought to address the content they were about to teach, and then completed a survey about those tasks. A comparison group also completed the survey. There was consensus across the groups of teachers about the potential of the tasks, they felt they could implement them and that such tasks were preferable to comparable textbook exercises. There are implications for both teacher educators, and for resource developers.