School Development – Don’t Upset the Ecosystem
I’m not a fan of education metaphors but in the spirit of true hypocrisy, here goes. In an ecosystem, there are some species that act a keystone. Their role is like a keystone in an arch – if you remove the keystone, the entire arch collapses. A famous example is the elimination of the Gray…
5 Ways to Make Tasks More Challenging
Making tasks challenging is incredibly difficult. A lot of the time, we simply don’t know how well learners will understand our instruction when they have such varying levels of prior knowledge. We face a variety of issues in implementing challenge:- How quickly some students disengage- Anticipating failure and reducing the level of challenge- Seeing learners…
Starter tasks – are we using them badly?
We know that the brain actively seeks to tie new information to what it already knows (i.e. schemas, activation theory etc) and the role prior knowledge plays in this. Therefore, the intention of an introductory task or ‘starter’ *should* be to elicit prior knowledge. This intention may have been lost along the way as the…
Where Do Classroom Tasks Fail? Part Three
Part one looked at the constructivist teaching fallacy and poor proxies for learning. Part two looked at the twin sins of curriculum design and mathemathantic effects. Part three will look at challenge-by-choice, anachronistic tasks and tasks that do not match their instructional intentions. Challenge-by-choice For those unfamiliar, challenge-by-choice refers to task-based differentiation, whereby the learner…
Why KWL Grids Are Not Fit For Purpose
If you are not familiar with KWL grids, let me explain. They are an assessment tool of three stages. What the learner already Knows (K), what the learner Wants to know 
and then finally what the learner has Learnt (L). So, they usually look something like this: Teachers give them to pupils at the…
Where Do Classroom Tasks Fail? Part Two
This is a blog in a series on task design. The others can be found here. Part one looked at the constructivist teaching fallacy and poor proxies for learning. This part will look at the twin sins of curriculum design and mathemathantic effects. The Twin Sins of Curriculum Design Wiggins and McTighe posit that curriculum…
Where Do Classroom Tasks Fail? Part One
This blog is part of a series on task design. The previous blogs can be found here. It seems obvious that to design tasks effectively, we need to know what can make tasks ineffective. By knowing these pitfalls, we can circumvent them and consequently design more effective tasks. I defined Constructivism in a previous blog,…
Designing Tasks to Support Long-Term Memory
This is blog 6 in a series on Task Design. The other blogs can be found here – Task Design Series. “Learning is defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” – Sweller (2011) This definition of learning as a change in long-term memory (LTM)…
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