Designing Tasks in Secondary Education: Enhancing Subject Understanding and Student Engagement

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:

• Designing tasks which engage learners with knowledge
• Policy perspectives on task design
• Designing cognitively demanding classroom tasks
• 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.

Ian Thompson is Associate Professor of English Education at the University of Oxford, UK.