Powerful Task Design: Rigorous and Engaging Tasks to Level Up Instruction

How can educators use technology to increase students’ engagement in activities essential to rigorous learning? What are the most effective tools for analyzing, designing, and refining those tasks of learning? And finally, how can we increase the cognitive rigor and thoughtful integration of technology into learning tasks, in order to better prepare students for college and beyond?

In Powerful Task Design, these questions and more will be answered, as you get to know the Powerful Task Rubric for Designing Student Work. Applicable for educators across all disciplines and grade levels, you’ll use the tool to analyze, design, and refine cognitively engaging tasks of learning. This guide will help you

• Explore and use the Powerful Task Rubric piece-by-piece in an easily digestible format to help you delve into the tool’s design components.
• Use technology to complete interactive tasks, and understand first-hand how technology is a critical design component in student task design that brings about more profound and relevant learning.
• Identify opportunities for creating powerful tasks in the areas of engagement, academic strategies, questions, and cognition.
• Supplement your task design arsenal with tools like the Diagnostic Instrument to Analyze Learning (DIAL).

This must-have resource brings together the research and strategies educators need to design engaging, powerful learning tasks. Student performance has a direct correlation to the power of the learning task - this book will help you positively impact both. 

John Antonetti is a learner. He has had the great fortune to visit classrooms throughout North America in an effort to answer the question "What truly engages learners?" From thousands of students in pre-K through Graduate School, John has learned the three facets of powerful learning tasks―intellectual, academic, and emotional engagement.

John Antonetti is a teacher. He has taught A.P Chemistry and Kindergarten and most grades in between in his home state of Arkansas. Once described by Larry Lezotte as a "teacher’s teacher," Mr. Antonetti works with schools across the country and Canada on student engagement, writing, rigor and relevance, powerful task design, and high-yield best practices.  As the former Director of Curriculum in the Sheridan School District in Arkansas, he took what he learned in his home district and developed strategies and protocols that work across all school types. He has partnered with five school districts that were awarded the nationally-recognized Broad Prize for Urban Education. While hands-on work in schools is his passion, John is also a highly-sought keynote speaker. His humor and parables are recognized by teachers, administrators, and parents as relevant examples of the power of teachers.

Antonetti is the author of the book, Writing as a Measure and Model of Thinking which utilizes the engagement cube and practical tools to increase student thinking in all subject areas. With his late business partner and friend, Jim Garver, John co-authored the ASCD best-seller 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t be Wrong: Strategies that Engage Students, Promote Active Learning, and Boost Achievement.