Designing and Using Authentic Tasks and Projects for Meaningful Learning and Assessment

Performance tasks and projects let students engage in deep and authentic learning and assessment that relies on applying disciplinary knowledge and engaging the 21st century skills—critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration—valued in the wider world. Classrooms that employ these experiences—or ideally are designed around them—stress using unique learning situations or contexts. Although these tasks and projects hold immense promise to engage students in meaningful learning, they come with their own challenges to design and implement.

This webinar will address some of these challenges using set of task and project design variables intended to help educators:

• Flexibly develop rich assessment and learning experiences based on curricular goals, instructional time, available resources, and student needs.
• Equitably implement performance tasks and projects.
• Manage a growth-centered and performance-based learning environment.

Jay McTighe brings a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments.

McTighe is an accomplished author, having co-authored 14 books, including the award-winning and best-selling Understanding by Design^® series with Grant Wiggins.

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Kristina Doubet is a professor in the College of Education at James Madison University. As an independent consultant and ASCD Faculty member, she has partnered with more than 100 schools, districts, and organizations around initiatives related to differentiated instruction, the Understanding by Design^® framework, classroom assessment, digital learning, and classroom management and grouping.

Doubet taught middle and high school language arts and has also served as an instructional coach and a curriculum developer in elementary and middle school classrooms.

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Eric Carbaugh is a professor in the Department of Middle, Secondary, and Mathematics Education at James Madison University. He has worked with more than 80 schools and districts on performance-based assessment, differentiated instruction, the Understanding by Design^® curriculum framework, effective use of instructional technology, and other various educational best practices.

Carbaugh has taught secondary school social studies as well as elementary language arts and history.

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