Many Chefs in the Kitchen—a Collaborative Model for Problem-Posing

Have you ever designed a challenging mathematical problem that you absolutely love, just to find that teachers hate it, that students don’t understand it, or that mathematicians find fault with it? The authors of this chapter comprise a diverse team of problem posers, including mathematics education researchers, teacher educators, and practicing teachers. We have joined forces in an R&D project whose primary goal is to encourage middle school teachers, teaching high-track classes, to conduct an increasing portion of their lessons around challenging mathematical problems. We hoped that the diversity of the team would help make the problems that we develop attractive in the eyes of all involved stakeholders. In this chapter, we follow the development and revision of three problems, and demonstrate how the diversity of the development team played out in practice. This diversity contributed to the quality of the outcome by eliciting tensions and conflicts across perspectives, and eventually to building a cumulative notion of what makes problems attractive.