I am really looking forward to this project, since it is a bit of a return to the style of learning I got used to at Quest! The question that I am interesting in exploring is "How can we design math questions to facilitate the development of problem-solving skills in students?"
I have been interested in problem design for a long time, really since I started noticing the difference between the complexity and richness of problems in some of my math classes as compared to others. As a student, I observed that this difference mostly came down to who was teaching the class, not the content. Now as an educator in training, I want to be someone who creates those rich problems for my students that help them view math as rooted in problem-solving and creative thinking more than in the memorization of formulas. I am also fortunate that my academic mentor while at Quest wrote her PhD on problem design and I believe Susan's was on word problems specifically. I've reached out already to my former mentor and gotten a few introductory pieces of literature to read which have only made more keen my interest in the topic.
I'm not entirely certain that I understand what exactly our concepts should look like, but three elements that I specifically want to consider (search terms, if you will) are "problem-solving," "problem design," and "flipped classrooms." In my own experience, these sort of complex problems are far more engaging when a teacher is not sitting at the front of the class with the answer, but I haven't done enough research into student motivations in problem-solving to know what amount of guidance is important in these complex problem-solving situations (at least for high school age students).
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