Designing Tasks In Secondary Education

Engaging students in learning about their subject is a central concern for all teachers and teacher educators. How teachers view and use the pedagogic potential of different tasks to engage pupils with knowledge in different subjects, is central to this endeavour. Designing Tasks in Secondary Education explores models for effective task design, helping you translate the curriculum into the tasks and activities that you ask your students to do in order to facilitate developmental or higher-level understanding of curriculum content. Written by experts in the field of education from a range of subjects and including a foreword written by renowned author Professor Walter Doyle, this book spans an international context and offers a refreshing alternative of how to plan and design tasks that will not only intellectually stimulate but improve teaching quality. Key topics explored include: Designing tasks which engage learners with knowledge Policy perspectives on task design Designing cognitively demanding classroom tasks Task design issues in the secondary subjects Designing Tasks in Secondary Education offers essential insight into task design and its importance for enhancing subject understanding and student engagement. It will challenge and support all education professionals concerned with issues of curriculum design, subject knowledge, classroom organisation, agency in the learning process and teaching quality.

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

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.

Aimed at the growing number of educators who are looking to move beyond covering the curriculum, Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects provides a comprehensive guide to ensuring students' deeper learning—in which they can transfer their knowledge, skills, and understandings to the world beyond the classroom. Readers will learn how to * Create authentic tasks and projects to address both academic standards and 21st century skills. * Apply task frames to design performance tasks that allow voice and choice for students. * Design and use criterion-based evaluation tools and rubrics for assessment, including those for students to use in self-assessment and peer assessment. * Incorporate performance-based instructional strategies needed to prepare students for authentic performance. * Differentiate tasks and projects for all students, including those needing additional support or challenge. * Effectively manage the logistics of a performance-based classroom. * Use project management approaches to facilitate successful implementation of tasks and projects. * Develop performance-based curriculum at the program, school, and district levels. Authors Jay McTighe, Kristina J. Doubet, and Eric M. Carbaugh provide examples and resources across all grade levels and subject areas. Teachers can use this practical guidance to transform their classrooms into vibrant centers of learning, where students are motivated and engaged and see relevance in the work they are doing.

Design and technology is a subject that interests and excites most young people. It requires them to work both practically and theoretically, to investigate and research, design, plan, make and evaluate. It encourages creativity, decision-making and problem-solving as pupils get to grips with real needs and real products. Design and technology covers work with electronics, food, materials such as wood, metal, plastics and textiles, and requires the development of graphical skills, practical skills and theoretical knowledge and understanding. Learning to Teach Design and Technology in the Secondary School, second edition, aims to help student-teachers develop their subject knowledge and professional knowledge and skills. It looks at the theory underpinning important issues and links this to practice in the classroom. Fully updated to take account of changes in the curriculum, there are new chapters on: teaching graphics, 14-19 vocational qualifications and cross-curricular links to literacy, numeracy, citizenship and sustainability. There are also chapters on: design and technology in the school curriculum developing areas of subject knowledge the importance of health and safety the use of ICT in the teaching of design and technology planning lessons managing the classroom assessment issues the integration of citizenship and sustainability into design and technology your own professional development. Bringing together insights from current educational theory and the best contemporary classroom teaching and learning, this book will prove an invaluable resource in enhancing the quality of initial school experience for the student teacher.

Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School is established as the key text for all those preparing to become art and design teachers in the secondary school. It explores a range of approaches to teaching and learning and provides a conceptual and practical framework for understanding the diverse nature of art and design in the secondary school curriculum. Written by experts in the field, it aims to inform and inspire, to challenge orthodoxies and encourage a freshness of vision. It provides support and guidance for learning and teaching in art and design, suggesting strategies to motivate and engage pupils in making, discussing and evaluating visual and material culture. The third edition has been comprehensively updated and re-structured in light of the latest theory, research and policy in the field and includes new chapters surveying assessment and examinations, and exploring identity and diversity in art and design. Essential topics include: Ways of learning in art and design Planning for teaching and learning Critical studies and methods for investigating art and design Inclusion Assessment Issues in craft and design education Drawing & sculpture Your own continuing professional development. Including suggestions for further reading and a range of tasks designed to encourage you to reflect critically on your practice, Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School addresses issues for student teachers and mentors on all initial teacher education courses in Art and Design. It will also be of relevance and value to teachers in school with designated responsibility for supervision.

*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.

This book presents an ambitious model for how educators can design high-quality, challenging, and supportive learning opportunities for English Learners and other students identified to be in need of language and literacy support. Starting with the premise that conceptual, analytic, and language practices develop simultaneously as students engage in disciplinary learning, the authors argue for instruction that amplifies—rather than simplifies—expectations, concepts, texts, and learning tasks. The authors offer clear guidance for designing lessons and units and provide examples that demonstrate the approach in various subject areas, including math, science, English, and social studies. This practical resource will guide teachers through the coherent design of tasks, lessons, and units of study that invite English Learners (and all students) to engage in productive, meaningful, and intellectually engaging activity. “This book offers the most detailed guide available for designing instruction for students categorized as ELLs. Theoretically grounded and informed by years of implementation and study, this work is without equal in the field. I recommend the book enthusiastically as required reading in all teacher preparation programs.” —Guadalupe Valdés, Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Stanford Graduate School of Education “Reflecting its title, this book is an amplification of what it means to provide the best learning opportunities for English Language learners. Drawing on classroom-based research, Amplifying the Curriculum offers many practical examples of intellectually engaging units and tasks. This innovative book belongs on the bookshelves of all teachers.” —Pauline Gibbons, UNSW Sydney “This timely book is a call to educators across the nation to integrate language, literacy, and disciplinary knowledge to improve the education of our new American students.” —Tatyana Kleyn, The City College of New York

Teaching English by Design has become a classic resource for preservice teachers as well as in-service teachers who consider it their go-to guide to creating lessons and units organized around key concepts. In the Second Edition, Peter Smagorinsky updates the content for today's teachers with discussions of New Literacies, using technology in the classroom, LGBTQ issues, and an expansive new chapter on preparing for Beginning Teacher Performance Assessments. He also brings in a fresh new voice and outlook from Darren Rhym, a high school teacher in rural Georgia. Following a new chapter on "Teaching Stressed Students Under Stressful Circumstances," Peter and Darren collaborated to create a unit on Power and Race. Designed to help students develop agency in improving their lives and those of the people in their communities, this sample unit provides a practical framework for addressing the needs of low-SES students who rely on limited resources. Together with Peter's unique insight about students, how they learn, and the kinds of classrooms that support their achievement, Teaching English by Design, 2/e is more valuable and relevant than ever.

This essential text unpacks major transformations in the study of learning and human development and provides evidence for how science can inform innovation in the design of settings, policies, practice, and research to enhance the life path, opportunity and prosperity of every child. The ideas presented provide researchers and educators with a rationale for focusing on the specific pathways and developmental patterns that may lead a specific child, with a specific family, school, and community, to prosper in school and in life. Expanding key published articles and expert commentary, the book explores a profound evolution in thinking that integrates findings from psychology with biology through sociology, education, law, and history with an emphasis on institutionalized inequities and disparate outcomes and how to address them. It points toward possible solutions through an understanding of and addressing the dynamic relations between a child and the contexts within which he or she lives, offering all researchers of human development and education a new way to understand and promote healthy development and learning for diverse, specific youth regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or history of adversity, challenge, or trauma. The book brings together scholars and practitioners from the biological/medical sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, educational science, and fields of law and social and educational policy. It provides an invaluable and unique resource for understanding the bases and status of the new science, and presents a roadmap for progress that will frame progress for at least the next decade and perhaps beyond.