May 10, 2018

DESIGNING AN ENGAGING ASSIGNMENT


1. Provide choices: Teachers in the real world recognize that although personalization has the potential to improve learning, our first job in applying any approach is to engage students in the learning process.... It’s about helping students find their spark and make their own fire. 
2. Offer a challenge: Students persevere when an assignment is not only interesting, but intellectually demanding. When John Hattie lists factors that relate to student achievement, he indicates the importance of ensuring that each assignment has the optimal level of challenge—not too hard, not too easy—because “the effect size of this so-called ‘Goldilocks’ level of challenge... nearly doubles the speed of learning.
3. Tell them why: Research has shown that people do better at a task—whether that task is spelling, hitting a curveball, or playing the viola—if they know why they’re doing it in the first place. School is often all about how—here’s how you do a quadratic equation, here’s how you write a five-paragraph essay, here’s how you do a paper chromatography experiment in chemistry. The fact is, we often give short shrift to why.
From: Edutopia

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