Exploring middle school teachers’ views about problem-posing tasks

Abstract

It is important to understand teachers’ views about problem-posing (PP) tasks and the prompts that are used in such tasks to engage students in posing problems. In this study, we explored 15 middle school mathematics teachers’ views about PP prompts. We found that the teachers’ views were motivated by their curricular reasoning around engaging and challenging their students and addressed five main prompt characteristics: openness, promoting critical thinking, providing scaffolding, more or less intimidating, and allowing for differentiation. The teachers’ reasoning suggested they attended to how PP can create opportunities for sensemaking, deepen students’ learning of mathematics, and foster students’ identities as creative doers of mathematics. However, they did not address connecting students’ life experiences to mathematics, another key goal of teaching mathematics through PP. The findings have implications for curriculum developers and researchers regarding the design of PP tasks and the implementation of such tasks in the classroom, and they suggest several directions for future research.