Powerful Task Design

Applicable to educators across all disciplines and grade levels, this book provides the tools to analyze, design, and refine cognitively engaging tasks of learning.

How can educators use technology to increase students’ engagement in activities essential to rigorous learning? What are the most effective tools for analyzing, designing, and refining those tasks of learning? And finally, how can we increase the cognitive rigor and thoughtful integration of technology into learning tasks, in order to better prepare students for college and beyond? In Powerful Task Design, these questions and more will be answered, as you get to know the Powerful Task Rubric for Designing Student Work. Applicable for educators across all disciplines and grade levels, you’ll use the tool to analyze, design, and refine cognitively engaging tasks of learning. This guide will help you Explore and use the Powerful Task Rubric piece-by-piece in an easily digestible format to help you delve into the tool’s design components. Use technology to complete interactive tasks, and understand first-hand how technology is a critical design component in student task design that brings about more profound and relevant learning. Identify opportunities for creating powerful tasks in the areas of engagement, academic strategies, questions, and cognition. Supplement your task design arsenal with tools like the Diagnostic Instrument to Analyze Learning (DIAL). This must-have resource brings together the research and strategies educators need to design engaging, powerful learning tasks. Student performance has a direct correlation to the power of the learning task - this book will help you positively impact both.

Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.

Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You’ll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage—and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching

This Handbook serves as a single source for theories, models, and methods related to cognitive task design. It provides the scientific and theoretical basis required by industrial and academic researchers, as well as the practical and methodological guidance needed by practitioners who face problems of building safe and effective human-technology s

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

A comprehensive account of the research and practice of task-based language teaching.

*THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AS OPEN ACCESS BOOK ON SPRINGERLINK* This open access book is the product of ICMI Study 22 Task Design in Mathematics Education. The study offers a state-of-the-art summary of relevant research and goes beyond that to develop new insights and new areas of knowledge and study about task design. The authors represent a wide range of countries and cultures and are leading researchers, teachers and designers. In particular, the authors develop explicit understandings of the opportunities and difficulties involved in designing and implementing tasks and of the interfaces between the teaching, researching and designing roles – recognising that these might be undertaken by the same person or by completely separate teams. Tasks generate the activity through which learners meet mathematical concepts, ideas, strategies and learn to use and develop mathematical thinking and modes of enquiry. Teaching includes the selection, modification, design, sequencing, installation, observation and evaluation of tasks. The book illustrates how task design is core to effective teaching, whether the task is a complex, extended, investigation or a small part of a lesson; whether it is part of a curriculum system, such as a textbook, or promotes free standing activity; whether the task comes from published source or is devised by the teacher or the student.