Task Rotations

1. Task Rotations Learning Target: • I can explain how task rotations help deepen student’s thinking and understanding, increase student engagement, and gather useful assessment information.

2. Mastery (Sensing and Thinking) SENSING Interpersonal (Sensing and Feeling) The Mastery style combines Sensing’s focus on details with Thinking’s objectivity. The Interpersonal style combines Sensing’s focus on details with the subjectivity of Feeling. Preferred mental operations include: remembering, sequencing, and practicing. Preferred mental operations include: empathizing, relating personally, and exploring feelings and values. THINKING FEELING Interpersonal questions ask students to: • Describe feelings and reactions • Empathize • Prioritize according to personal values • Reflect • Make decisions Mastery questions ask students to: • Recall • Describe • Sequence • Provide examples • Summarize Understanding (Intuition and Thinking) Self-Expressive (Intuition and Feeling) The Understanding style combines the big-picture focus of Intuition with the objectivity of Thinking. The Self-Expressive style combines the big-picture focus of Intuition with the subjectivity of Feeling. Preferred mental operations include: reasoning, interpreting, and proving. Preferred mental operations include: imagining, predicting, and reorganizing. Understanding questions ask students to: •Compare and contrast •Prove or disprove •Explain how or why •Classify •Infer Self-Expressive questions ask students to: •Associate •Think divergently •Develop metaphors •Imagine or hypothesize •Create or synthesize INTUITION

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5. KCCT Released Item The diagram above shows a cell and its organelles. Select FOUR of its organelles and explain how the structures and functions of those organelles within the cell are similar to the structures and functions of different parts of your school.

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8. Who You Gonna Call? • Skim pgs. 241-246 in The Strategic Teacher • What is a task rotation? • Prove or disprove this statement: Task rotations are best used as unit assessments. • Create another name for “task rotations” that might be more appealing to students. • Examine the “potpourri” of task rotations on pg. 245. Which ones do you like best? Why?

9. What Can Task Rotation Do for You and Your Students? Goal #1: Differentiating Teaching and Learning Goal #2: Deepening Memory and Comprehension Goal #3: Increasing Student Engagement Goal #4: Gathering Meaningful Assessment Data Goal #5: Improving the Quality of Student Thinking Goal #6: Developing Students’ Habits of Mind

10. Goals of Task Rotation: Depth and Breadth • To help students master basic factual material by asking them to recall facts or definitions, use sequences, use categories, and or use procedures. • To help students increase understanding by asking them to compare and contrast, summarize, prove, and/or establish causal relationships. • To help students to reorganize content by asking them to hypothesize, imagine and elaborate, use metaphors, and/or synthesize. • To help students relate personally to the content by describing feelings, empathizing, express a preference, or make a value judgment or reflect upon decisions and outcomes.

11. How Does a Task Get Its Style? We’ve already begun to explore and answer this question, but now it’s your turn to use real classroom tasks to develop a better answer. So take a close look at the different styles of tasks in the potpourri. Identify some key “thinking verbs” or other phrases that help you identify the style of the task.

12. Phases of a Task Rotation Lesson etermine the standards you want to focus on and use them to clarify your purpose. stablish a work plan. rovide tasks in all four styles. hinkthrough the criteria for assessment. elpstudents reflect on their learning.

14. Big Idea: Structure and Transformation of Matter (Grade 4)

15. Big Idea: The Earth and The Universe (Grade 4)

16. Identify Purposes:

17. What’s Under My Feet?

19. Criteria • Look for criteria that unite all four tasks OR develop criteria for each task. • Might depend upon your Work Plan. • Use your deconstruction of the standard to develop your criteria.

20. Work Plan • Students will complete all tasks. • Students should complete the tasks in the following order: • Mastery • Understanding • Self-expressive • Interpersonal

21. What’s Under My Feet?

22. DemonstrationDefinitionSummarizing and ReportingDiagramming and LabelingVisual Organizers Decision Making Empathizing Self-Analysis and Goal-Setting Conflict/Resolution Exploring Feeling and Personal Reaction Comparison Classification Debugging/Problem Solving Analysis/Explanation Argument Speculation Metaphor/Simile/Analogy Design Divergent Thinking Artistic Expression

23. More or Less: Six Criteria for Assessing Your Task Rotations Purposeless - Sometimes a Task Rotation suffers from not having a clear purpose. Students are not clear about the purpose of a particular activity or the Task Rotation as a whole. The clearer we are about why we are using the Task Rotation and what we are trying to accomplish, the more successful it will be. Style-less – Sometimes a Task Rotation lacks style. It has four activities but they are not style-based, or there is not a diversity of styles represented, or the styles are confused. The more we understand the thinking process associated with each of the styles, the more effective we will be in designing and selecting style-based tasks.

24. What’s Under My Feet?

25. More or Less: Six Criteria for Assessing Your Task Rotations Interest-less – Sometimes the tasks in a Task Rotation are not engaging and do not capture the interest of the students they are intended for. The more we take student interest into account the more effective our Task Rotation will be. Clueless – Sometimes the Task Rotation is plagued by vagueness because the students do not have a clue about what it is they are supposed to do. The clearer we are about the specific products the student needs to produce and how it will be judged, the more effective the Task Rotation will be.

26. What’s Under My Feet?

27. More or Less: Six Criteria for Assessing Your Task Rotations Balance-less – Sometimes a Task Rotation can be out of balance. This means that the complexity and time it takes to do one task or the simplicity of a task is not in line with the other tasks. The more the Task Rotation activities are balanced according to complexity and the time it takes to complete each task, the more successful it will be. Thoughtless - Of all the members of the “Less” family, this one is the most serious. Sometimes a Task Rotation meets all the effective criteria but has four tasks that really do not require thought or a level of thinking worthy of classroom time. The more the Task Rotation engages students in meaningful thought, the more effective it will be.

28. What’s Under My Feet?

29. Revision • Working with a table partner, use the six “LESS” criteria to make further revisions to the What’s Under My Feet? task rotation. • Compare your revision ideas with another table pair.

30. Synthesis • Quickly, jot down your personal definition of a task rotation. • What did you find easy about this process and revision? • What was most difficult for you? • What ideas do you have for using task rotations in your classroom?

31. Practice • Select one of the following task rotations to review. • Weather • Plants • Animals Adapt • Animal Behavior • Use the six “Less” criteria to make revisions to the task rotation you selected. • Jot down notes from this process that might be helpful to you as you design your own task rotation.

32. Game Time! • Select a topic and identify the related standards. • Draft a Task Rotation for your selected topic. • Swap your TR with a tablemate and provide feedback using the six “Less” criteria.