Fewer Tasks but More Rigor

Thirty slides.

Five bullets, one header, and one picture per slide.

At least four primary sources, with citations on each slide.

A one-page summary of the full slide deck.

And the list goes on...

Perhaps you’ve seen task-based assignments like this. Maybe you’ve even created and assigned this kind of work to your students. I’m guilty, too. When I first started teaching, I would create Sisyphean projects for my kids to work on for days at a time.

Part of me felt like the more tasks students had to complete, the more I was challenging them. Another side of this approach was rooted in a less-than-successful response to the administrative push (at the time) that the teacher should be a facilitator rather than the “sage on the stage.” But also, if I’m honest, that first year of teaching was so draining that I welcomed any opportunity to simply keep my class occupied for a few days while I tried to gain some footing with planning and grading and parent contact. Nonetheless, my strategy was flawed, and my kids were not being appropriately challenged.

Over the years, I’ve noticed these same time-consuming projects—teeming with steps, but not always rigorous or challenging—making their way most frequently into the classrooms of new and novice social studies teachers. If that teacher is you, here are some easy steps you can take to ensure productive struggle instead of an overemphasis on task completion.

Start with the standards

Any instructional design, including for projects, should start with the content standards. Standards are designed to guide instruction according to the appropriate rigor of your grade level and content. At first glance, social studies standards often look ripe for task-heavy projects.

For instance, here is a middle school social studies standard in New Jersey that points to causes of the Revolutionary War:

“6.1.8.HistoryCC.3.a: Explain how the consequences of the Seven Years’ War, changes in British policies toward American colonies, and responses by various groups and individuals in the North American colonies led to the American Revolution.”

As a new social studies teacher, you may gaze at these words and find yourself itching to have students create a slide deck for every British act passed from 1763 to 1774 that led to colonial insurrection. In the name of differentiation by choice, you might even give students the option to compile the same information into a detailed timeline with a summary of each act passed.

However, this standard (like all middle and high school social studies standards) calls for more than a summary of events. Some may argue this, but memorization and recall play a vital role in social studies. Yet the retrieval of facts, events, and details is not an end, but rather a means for students to build complex thought. Standard 6.1.8.HistoryCC.3.a conveys this idea because it requires not only that students understand the change in British policy (act after act), but also—in conjunction with the other components of the standard—that students wrestle with how these policies led to revolt.

So, while a traditional unpacking of the standard—of its key nouns as content to grasp and its verbs as skills to be taught—provides a solid road map, it is essentially all about giving students the opportunity to grapple with the relationship between cause and effect amid the backdrop of colonial America. Any project based on 6.1.8.HistoryCC.3.a should reflect this.

Assess the level of challenge

To both align a project with the skill required to meet a standard and assess the level of challenge for students, I prefer to use Bloom’s Taxonomy. Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Levels work as well.

If students are simply copying information from a primary or secondary source (such as a timeline of events leading to the Revolutionary War), this lands at the lowest level of both Bloom’s and DOK. To be clear, every aspect of every activity does not always have to represent the peak level of challenge. However, a project should challenge students beyond recall and understanding.

The standard we are using tells us that students should be able to explain how various components (consequences of war, changes in British policies, responses by various groups and individuals) relate to one another and eventually led to revolution. Cause and effect, breaking information down to smaller components, and examining relationships are all aspects of the analysis level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

It’s critical for social studies teachers to internalize skill sets—such as those identified by Bloom’s or DOK—because this is where the rigor required by standards comes alive. Content alone is not enough. So, the question becomes: How can I now revise the project to fully align with the standard and skill level required?

Target depth over project size and process

If we really wanted students to capture each component of 6.1.8.HistoryCC.3.a—the consequences of the Seven Years’ War that impacted British policies, what those policies were, the groups and individuals the standard is referencing, and their responses to Britain’s policies—how many slides do you think kids would have to create? How intense would that timeline be if one student or even a small group were responsible for it?

Alternatively, using the standard and Bloom’s, a project requiring students to analyze relationships and factors leading to war may simply begin with one guiding analytical cause-and-effect question that all students could contend with. Here are some examples:

• Was the American Revolution inevitable—or did specific people making specific choices cause it to happen?
• Could the American Revolution have been prevented? If so, how? If not, why?
• Who or what is most responsible for the American Revolution?

Now the prospective project itself is tethered to a challenging question that requires analysis and evidence. Once your question meets the requirements, the world is your oyster.

With a rigorous, standards-based guiding question, the project itself becomes less about the medium (slide deck, timeline, map, paper, podcast, etc.), how much time students are occupied, or a burdensome process, and more about the depth of thought work that each student engages in.