Designing Tasks in Secondary Education

Enhancing subject understanding and student engagement

Ian Thompson, Ian Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317627159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

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:

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• Designing tasks which engage learners with knowledge

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• Policy perspectives on task design

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• Designing cognitively demanding classroom tasks

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• 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.

PART I The background

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755434-1

1 INTRODUCTION

Tasks, concepts and subject knowledge

Ian Thompson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755434-2

Douglas Barnes (1976) prefaced his aptly titled book From Communication to Curriculum by pointing out that orthodox curriculum theory analyses curriculum process from the teacher’s objectives rather than learners’ understandings. Engaging students in learning about their subject is a central concern for all teachers and teacher educators. The issue of task design in secondary education, how teachers view and use the pedagogic potential of different tasks to engage pupils with knowledge in different subjects, is central to this endeavour. Subject task design relates to the ways teachers translate the curriculum into the tasks and activities that they ask their pupils to do in order to facilitate developmental or higher-level understanding of curriculum content. This involves identifying the goal or purpose of the task, the resources available in a given setting, and the forms of instruction and intervention that allow pupils to process the information as they negotiate the task activities.

The background to this book on task design is that for the past 25 years the curriculum in the UK, and subsequently teaching, has been dominated by the introduction and implementation of government national strategies. In the secondary school environment this has often led to teaching through narrow and restrictive versions of ‘teaching objectives’ and patterns of assessment that focus on product and external examinations rather than process and student development. This pattern of curriculum imposition is not unique to the UK of course and educators in many other settings and contexts will recognise the same pressures on teaching and learning. The danger is that pedagogic practices that promote students’ learning and knowledge transformation through active participation can be largely shelved (or hidden) in favour of a passive form of knowledge acquisition through transmission assessed by recall of knowledge gleaned from others or the mastery of technical skills.

One of the aims of this book is to help re-professionalise teachers and question approaches to curriculum imposition. The emphasis is on enhancing students’ learning, and prospective and experienced teachers’ practice, through a focus on curriculum design, classroom subject knowledge, subject task design, classroom organisation, assessment, student engagement and questions of agency in the learning process. We aim to help to develop an understanding of task design as a pedagogic tool that will provide insights for teacher training and teacher development in enhancing subject understanding and student engagement.

The focus on task design stems from many years of conversation: in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford (OUDE); in our innovative internship initial teaching education (ITE) programme (Benton 1990: McIntyre 1997); in sessions of our Master’s in Learning and Teaching course; and in talks with both prospective and practicing teachers. The Oxford Internship scheme was set up by OUDE in 1987 in collaborative partnership with the Oxfordshire Local Education Authority and its local secondary schools. The commitment to school-based and research led teacher training was underpinned by ‘sustained critical dialogue between the different kinds of expertise which teachers and university lecturers could bring as equal partners to considerations of teaching expertise’ (Hagger and McIntyre 2006: 15). The educational landscape may have changed, particularly in school governance and the role of local educational authorities, but the collaborative partnership between OUDE and Oxfordshire schools remains strong in both initial teacher education and in educational research.

Subject knowledge and concept acquisition

Mercer (2000) identifies three methods that good teachers use when they teach well:

1. They use question-and-answer sequences not just to test knowledge, but also to guide the development of understanding.
2. They teach not just ‘subject knowledge’, but also procedures for solving problems and making sense of experience.
3. They treat learning as a ‘social, communicative process’.

(Mercer 2000: 160)

In other words good teaching is as much to do with the processes of pupils’ learning as it is to do with the outcomes of that teaching. The act of learning for the secondary school student takes place within a constructed classroom zone (Newman, Griffin, and Cole 1989): instruction and learning within this zone involves both mediated activity and the participants’ cultural contexts and past histories. Pedagogy, in this definition of learning, has to attend to both the cognitive and affective processes involved in learners’ development. Teachers, to borrow Vygotsky’s metaphor, have to conduct the classroom environment whilst attending to the following questions regarding task design in the different motives and varied sub-practices of school subjects:

• What matters in my subject?
• How does task design relate to subject knowledge?
• What is meant by task demand?
• How do tasks/activities help students conceptualise?

Viv Ellis characterises subject knowledge ‘as a form of expertise that exists amongst people who engage in the same kind of practice’ (Ellis 2007: 167). Ellis rightly warns against a potential pitfall involved in using metaphors of subject knowledge or pedagogical content knowledge:

The effect of such metaphors (intended or otherwise) is to distinguish between certain high-status kinds of knowledge that are fixed and universal (subjects or disciplines) and lower status forms of (albeit valued and valuable) ‘professional’ knowledge that depends on ‘use-value’ and context.

(Ellis 2007: 167)

Pedagogy involves both knowledge about subject and knowledge about how to learn the subject. If the teacher or teacher educator as subject specialist is the all knowing master, then the apprentice could be viewed as being merely a spectator in their own learning. Learning is more complex and requires the learners’ active involvement in the dialectical relationship of appropriation and internalisation. At the same time, it would be dangerous to ignore the importance of teachers’ knowledge of their subject and the ways in which to teach what Schwab (1978) described as the substantive (key concepts) and syntactic (ways of knowing and representing) knowledge required in a particular subject. Egan argues that the task of teaching is to help learners to engage with the symbolic representations of knowledge that remain hidden without the acquisition by learners of the cultural and social tools needed to translate them_

The educational task, then, involves the resuscitation of knowledge from its suspended animation in symbolic codes. The task is to convert, reanimate, transmute the symbolic codes into living human knowledge in students’ minds.

(Egan 2005: 95)

Designing classroom tasks to enable learning requires the teacher to attend to both the design of the learning environment and to conceptual design (see Derry 2013). Vygotsky (1998) and his colleague Shif extended Vygotsky’s (1988) theories of scientific and spontaneous concept development to the field of education. Vygotsky argued that scientific concepts have their origins in the structured academic activity of classroom instruction. Schools introduce scientific, logically defined concepts to students. Spontaneous concepts, on the other hand, emerge from the student’s own reflections of everyday experience. The relationship between the two types of concept formation is dialectical: spontaneous concepts develop upwards towards greater abstractness just as scientific concepts develop downwards towards greater concreteness. Only when both concepts merge do students develop mature understanding.

Barnes (1976) argues that: ‘Many of the tasks set in schools do not make it easy for pupils to utilize their everyday knowledge’ (Barnes 1976: 29). Barnes describes everyday knowledge as ‘action knowledge’ as opposed to ‘school knowledge’ rather than spontaneous or scientific knowledge but the interrelation between the two forms of knowledge is the same. In setting the activities for classroom tasks, teachers need to attend to the following questions:

• How are students’ everyday understandings used in the learning?
• What part does talk and language play and what is the role of the teacher in relation to this classroom talk?
• What areas of substantive and syntactic knowledge are learners engaged with?
• What kinds of support are built into different activities in the task sequence?
• What are the different support demands on the teacher, peers, or other adults?
• What are the different assessment demands?
• Do the activities allow opportunities for formative assessment so that support can be adjusted?
• Does the assessment of outcome allow assessment of the teaching objective?

Classroom task design

One of the first questions for teachers to ask when designing a classroom task is: what is the educational function of the task and how should its design maximise the learning potential? Alexander (2000) makes the following distinction between ‘task’ and ‘activity’.

The ‘task’ dimension of a learning assignment is concerned with cognitive demand, ways of knowing and kinds of learning while ‘activity’ connotes the ways these are packaged for teaching purposes.

(Alexander 2000: 535)

Task design involves both elements of teachers’ understanding task demand and a focus on the design of the activities and classroom organisation in which the task demands are played out. Vygotsky’s followers Davydov (1990) and Elkonin (1999) used the phrase ‘learning activity’ to describe the design of activities that address the development of students’ grasp and use of higher order theoretical concepts. The students in this sort of classroom are active agents in their own learning through social collaboration with their teacher and peers. It is in this same context that Vygotsky described the teacher as the conductor of the social environment: both integral to the activity but reliant on social interaction for the symphony to be played.

Doyle and Carter (1984), building on Doyle’s (1979) earlier conceptual framework of task analysis for integrating the academic and managerial aspects of classroom activity, argue that an academic (school) task has three elements: (1) a goal or product; (2) a set of resources or ‘givens’ available in the situation; and (3) a set of operations that can be applied to the resources to reach the goal or generate the product. Doyle (1983: 162) wrote, ‘task is more than just content. It also includes the situation in which content is embedded’. Doyle goes on to argue that task accomplishment has two consequences:

First, a person will acquire information – facts, concepts, principles, solutions – involved in the particular task that is accomplished. Second, a person will practice operations – memorising, classifying, inferring, analysing – used to obtain or produce the information demanded by the task.

(Doyle 1983: 162)

It is important to add that the situation in which these operations take place is a social one – the classroom environment. Shavelson and Stern (1981) argue that task design should consider the following:

• content – the subject matter to be taught
• materials – the things that learners can observe/manipulate
• activities – the things the learners and teacher will be doing in the lesson
• goals – the teacher’s general aim for the task (these are more general and vague than objectives)
• students – their abilities, needs and interests are important
• social community – the class as a whole and its sense of ‘groupness’

(Shavelson and Stern 1981: 478)

The question remains: does the design of linked tasks clearly highlight what is to be learnt – both substantive and syntactic knowledge? In considering what is to be learnt, we need now to consider how that learning is supported by task design.

Designing contingent support for concept development

One of Vygotsky’s (1998) key theoretical points is that we learn through mediated activity. As Wertsch states of Vygotsky:

In his view a hallmark of human consciousness is that it is associated with the use of tools, especially ‘psychological tools’ or ‘signs.’ Instead of acting in a direct, unmediated way in the social and physical world, our contact with the world is indirect or mediated by signs.

(Wertsch 2007:178)

But our contact with the world is also mediated through our interaction with more ‘expert’ others: more expert in their use of socially, culturally, and historically acquired and developed psychological tools. From the work of Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), the concept of ‘scaffolding’ developed as a metaphor to describe the wide range of strategies such as modelling, suggestion or structuring by which an adult or more e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Part I The background
• Part II Learning from the subjects
• Part III Looking forward
• Index