As we near the end of the academic year, I've been having discussions with colleagues at school about what has proven a worthwhile focus of our time over the past 12 months. Task design has dominated these discussions.
After reading Elliot Morgan's brilliant blog series around task design last Summer, it became clear this was something we hadn't thought about carefully enough. So on our inset day last summer, I posed a simple question to our staff team: how effective are the tasks we ask our children to complete?
It opened a can of worms. What do we mean by effective? How do we assess a task's effectivness? Are we prioritising task completion over knowledge comprehension? How do we ensure an equity in the quality of tasks across all subjects given how time-poor our teachers are? Evidently, task design is not as simple as it sounds.
After working through Elliot's blog series, analysing our curriculum together and conversing about our findings, we arrived at a distinction we've found to be really helpful. Flabby vs meaty.
A flabby task can take time to complete, it can engage the students and often look pretty or fill a page in a book and evidence a lesson. However a flabby task also lacks focus and a clarity around the knowledge we want a student to leave with and retain.
A meaty task can take time to complete, it can engage the students but often gets ugly and complicated as students wrestle with its complexity. A meaty task has a clear application for the knowledge a student has learnt.
We generated examples together of what flabby and meaty tasks might look like in the curriculum. When our Year 4 students look at classification keys in Science, we had a lesson in our curriculum where they classified a range of sweets based on different properties. We devised an alternative suggestion where students go out to our school pond, make lists of the living things they encounter and create their own classification keys to identify the similarities and differences between the creatures and organisms in that habitat. Still memorable, still engaging but more purposeful, subject driven and focussed.
With two definitions and a small bank of shared examples in place, it became easier for teachers and subject leads to begin classifying the tasks in their curriculum. Our Science, Geography and History leads spent time with each year group over the course of the year breaking down their curriculums lesson by lesson and discussing the tasks. The role of gentle debate and expert-led discussion can't be underplayed here, by marrying the subject leads and the year group teachers, we were able to analyse with both a whole school and individual cohort lens. We documented this work and intend to assess the outcomes of these tasks over the course of the next academic year, but through this work alone we discovered three interesting things...
With time, teachers can devise engaging and meaningful learning opportunities.
It sounds so obvious, but as we had these frank discussions this year, it became clear that time to think a little deeper is incredibly valuable. Our teachers knew the tasks that were effective, they knew the lessons that just sang. But in a relentless, high-pressure job, where they have 14 subject curriculums to squeeze in, there just wasn't always the time to go beyond the first idea they arrived at, the thing they did last year or the digital download they could find on their lunch break. If we wanted our tasks to be more effective and our curriculum offer to improve, those in the driving seat of our curriculum needed the time to consider carefully, work collaboratively and plan and prepare adequately.
2. Creating effective tasks is hard.
In a conversation this week, a colleague spoke to me about their excitement around our task design focus. They said, "The thing about meaty tasks is there is always room to trim more fat."
I love that. The old adage that 'curriculum is never finished' is true and exciting but it can also be disheartening. This year we've had to throw out tasks in our curriculum that took time to develop for the very simple reason that they weren't helping our students learn what we had intended. Taking a critical look in the mirror of curriculum can reveal some surprises we wish we hadn't spotted. But by developing a shared understanding around effective task design and a shared vocabulary of flabby vs meaty, we're getting better at spotting those areas we can improve and now getting excited about the tasks we can fine tune further.
3. Meaty tasks are memorable and magical.
I guess the easy accusation to be levelled here is that we are robbing students of the 'primariness' of primary. If I'm honest, it was a backlash I worried I'd see in school- will we lose the magic? Are we just being joy hoovers? But I've found the opposite to be true. Sure, we've taken away some of our tasks that produced the prettiest outcomes or those 'WOW! lessons' that look super to an external eye but we haven't robbed the curriculum of its heart in the process. In fact, one of the most special things that has happened is hearing more students talk about their learning, and in particular the challenges they've wrestled with and overcome, the new knowledge they've retained and the feeling of accomplishment they have. Our classrooms still feel magical because learning itself is magical- perhaps even more so now because there's a clarity and a purpose to each task.
We started our year asking ourselves how effective are the tasks we ask our children to complete? And we end our year with a simple answer; more effective. And surely that's what we all want for our curriculum, right? To continue on a cycle of improvment.
As this academic year draws to a close, we're all in need of a rest. But if over the summer you can read Elliot's task design blog series (https://morgsedu.wordpress.com/2022/07/09/task-design-series/), I'd encourage you to do so! And here are a couple of things to consider whether a teacher or subject lead next year..
How can you make time for conversations about the tasks within your curriculum?
Are there areas of your curriculum where task design is stronger? What can you learn from these areas?
Where can you trim the fat when it comes to task design and offer something sharper?
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