The document provides guidance for teachers on setting purposeful tasks and activities that encourage students to think meaningfully about the concepts being taught. It emphasizes that all tasks should directly help students learn and make progress, not just occupy time. Tasks should present an appropriate level of challenge for all students. The main goal of any activity is to get students to think purposefully about the knowledge and skills being taught by linking new content to existing understanding. Too many tasks in a lesson can distract from learning; it is better to focus on a few substantial tasks that challenge students to work hard and feel proud of their accomplishments.

1. Cher well L earning
BULLETIN - February 2012
Research overview - 5 ideas on: Tasks and Activities
EWAP task setting
When setting tasks, think EWAP - Everything With a Purpose -
what is the point of this activity and how is it helping the students
to make progress towards what you want them to learn? (The Lazy
Teacher’s Handbook, Jim Smith).
Implications for our teaching:
- pur-poseful
Are the tasks we are setting directly helping the students to make progress?
- Are we in the habit of putting tasks in to ‘get them thinking’, or
‘warm them up’? If so, is this working, or is it getting in the way of the
real learning we want them to undertake? Do we need that starter or
extra help-ing
activity? Is that time-consuming ‘attention grabber’ really them to think about the concepts we need them to engage with?
Low-access/ high-challenge tasks
. ALL of the students need to be able to undertake the task
meaningfully, and there needs to be challenge built in for the top
end. (NRICH Project). Students know when they are being set low-value,
filler tasks, and put much less effort in to these tasks. It’s
therefore important that we plan tasks to be as valuable and pur
poseful as possible - they should be ‘worth their weight in learning’
Implications for our teaching:
- How can we set success criteria for tasks, so that there is open-ended
challenge for all, in every task? What are our entry level requirements,
and what might students do to explore excellent in their completion
of the task?
- How do we provide challenge in every task, no matter how small?
For example, when using questioning at the beginning of a lesson,
challenge can be provided from the start by asking fewer questions,
but putting more emphasis on the quality of the response that stu-dents
are coming up with.
Getting them to Think
- ‘Memory / learning is a residue of thought’...’You remember what you think
about’ - the only way we can get students to understand new material is to get
them to think meaningfully about the subject matter or concepts that we are t
rying to get across (and the only way we can think about anything, is to link it t
o similar knowledge that we already understand). The main point of setting
ANY activities or tasks is to get students to think purposefully about the
knowledge or skills that we want them to learn. (Why Don’t Students Like School?
Daniel Willingham)
Implications for our teaching:
- Review lesson plans in terms of ‘what the student is likely to think about’.
- when introducing new content or ideas, always try to make links with similar con-tent
or ideas that the students already understand.
- Take care with ‘attention grabbers’ - how can we make sure that they direct think-ing
purposefully, and don’t distract? This is a particular challenge when setting cre-ative
/ active tasks - how do we make sure they think about the learning, and not
just the socially-involving experience of doing the task itself?
- Moving away from IRE questioning and using strategies such as ‘think time’ and Ques-tioning
for Engagement gives us a better chance of being confident that students
are thinking about the right things in lessons.
How many tasks?
- Sometimes, lessons are less successful because the teacher has worked too
hard and provided too many activities. ‘We don’t want to see lessons
that are too crowded, too frenetic and with too many activities
designed simply to impress the inspectors’ (Wilshaw / Ofsted
Guidance). Often, this can suppress learning, as students aren’t required to
become immersed in any particular task, and therefore don’t find the depth
and challenge in the activity. Whilst variety in tasks is important, and can help
students to learn, it’s also important that students work hard in lessons on
completing carefully set-up, substantial tasks.
Implications for our teaching:
- Are we setting tasks that challenge students, and ask them to really
get stuck in to the learning? Is there the potential, in every task we set,
for students to work hard, push themselves and feel justifiably proud
of what they achieve? Sometimes, it’s better to take tasks out of les-sons,
in order to provide the time and attention needed to do the re-maining
tasks really well.
- Are we providing the conditions in which students can work hard
and without distraction, eg by using strategies like the C-system, struc-turing
group / paired activities carefully and using periods of silent
work at times?
- Are we planning too many tasks? Are we working too hard, so that
the students don’t end up having to?
Some tasks and activities that (might!) work:
Top 5: ask students to choose a top 5 from a particular topic (eg
causes of WW1, factors needed for photosynthesis to occur, rea
sons we should act on global warming, characteristics needed of a
leader, ways to skin a cat). They need to: List all 5, Explain their
top 3, and Justify their top 1 (teaching of explanation / justifica
tion needed!)
Here’s the answer, what’s the question? Give them an answer,
they make a list of possible questions which would result in that
answer.
Use www.wordle.net to create a word cloud of text from your
topic (eg the course syllabus, a relevant website, an online article) -
students can then be asked to explain the reasons why some words
and ideas are high-frequency, and make links between the words
which appear on the cloud.
- Get ideas on activities from the Random Learning Event Genera-tor,
at www.bit.ly/AGQwn (sample task - Do ‘uses of the apostrophe’
as ‘an abstract impressionist painting) (!)
- Speed draw what you learnt last lesson (either in your own subject
or wherever they’ve just come from)
- Britain’s Hexago-ing Crazy - put key learning points from your
topic onto hexagons - students make hexagon maps, annotating them
to show the main ideas link together
Quiz-Quiz-Trade - always a winner - you are the students prepare
cards with a question on one side and the answer on the other. Stu-dents
walk around the room, find a partner, high 5, answer their part-ners
question, then the cards are traded and off they go again.
Reduced Learning Company - students prepare a 30 second piece
of drama at the end of the lesson, showing what they’ve learnt.