#PowerfulTaskDesign
The following is a recap of our Teacher Academy lead by @GraysonLawrence on his work with the Powerful Conversations Network!
In our most recent teacher academy I met with teachers to discuss a learning opportunity I am participating in with a couple of our teachers. We are participating in Powerful Conversations Network through the Alabama Best Practices Center. This years we are studying the book #PowerfulTaskDesign by John Antonetti and Terri Stice. We were able to bring back some wonderful ideas to discuss with our faculty after our first professional development day. One of the most important parts in teacher planning is having teachers design learning tasks that are powerful and meaningful for the content they are learning. We spent our time in teacher academy looking at student tasks from our classrooms and discussed the components of a powerful task better know as the Task Design Component. There are three components of a learning task:
- Cognitive Demand- the minimal thinking a task will require of the learnings.
- Thinking Strategies- the required visible evidence of Personal Response.
- Engaging Qualities- the elements and conditions that elicit energy and enthusiasm.
I asked teachers to share some learning tasks they had students do during the last week to determine whether they were powerful or powerless tasks using The Original Powerful Task Rubric. I thought this process was validating to many of our teachers as they saw that the tasks they are having students do in the classroom are very powerful crossing the rigor divide resulting in engaging and meaningful work for our students. I felt the work teachers are beginning to do with designing powerful tasks will be beneficial to them as they are collaborating to develop project-based learning projects in the very near future. There is no doubt that powerful learning task will result in an even more powerful project. This is just the beginning of the work we will be doing with our teachers in creating and developing powerful learning task.