The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 283
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 283 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll be taking a close look at performance assessments and how to make sure they measure what really matters.
GONZALEZ: Imagine a basketball coach spending an entire season teaching players how to dribble, pass, and shoot, but never letting them play an actual game. Instead, at the end of the season, the coach gives them a written test about basketball.
Or what about a theater teacher spending a whole semester teaching students how to memorize lines, project their voices, and move around a stage. Then, rather than performing in an actual play, their final assignment is to create a video explaining the techniques of good acting.
Both scenarios sound ridiculous. But in classrooms, we sometimes do the equivalent. We teach students individual skills and chunks of knowledge, then assess how well they’ve learned them without ever asking them to put everything together in a meaningful performance.
When we want to find out what students have learned, a traditional test can tell us quite a bit. But if we want to know whether students can actually apply their knowledge and skills to solve problems, make decisions, or create something meaningful, we need a different kind of assessment.
That’s where performance assessments, or performance tasks, come in. These are projects and other assignments where students demonstrate their learning by doing something with it, like designing a solution to a problem, developing a proposal, or creating something for a real audience. When designed well, they can give us a much richer picture of what students know and can do. And while many teachers already use projects and other performance-based assessments in their classrooms, a few common design mistakes can prevent these tasks from giving us the evidence of learning we’re really looking for.
My guest today is Jay McTighe, whose work I’ve followed since reading Understanding by Design, the book he co-authored with the late Grant Wiggins that introduced educators to backward design. In our conversation, Jay walks us through three examples of effective performance tasks, explains what makes them work, and shows us how to design our own — including some common mistakes that can undermine their effectiveness.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank Highfive for sponsoring this episode. If you’re like a lot of school leaders, you know the frustration of the revolving office door. Kids go straight from a warning to a write-up, and the consequences don’t change their behavior. Right now, lots of schools track behaviors on paper, spreadsheets, or systems that don’t talk to each other. Highfive was built to solve this exact problem. Created by Nathan Maynard, the author of Hacking School Discipline, Highfive is a behavior management platform built on a simple idea: Every discipline issue is a chance to teach. Instead of just tracking punishments, Highfive equips your staff to recognize the skills students have and teach the skills they’re missing. It turns behavioral challenges into learning opportunities, and gets teachers and MTSS leaders on the same page. Ready to reimagine what discipline looks like in your building? Head over to highfive.school/cult. You’ll get a quick walkthrough of the dashboard so you can see how it works. That’s highfive.school/cult.
Support also comes from Mastering the Lesson Plan. Every year, teaching seems to get more and more challenging. There are so many factors outside of your control, but one thing you can control is your lesson planning. It’s at the core of our craft as teachers, and there are time-tested principles that can help anyone get better at it. Whether you’re brand-new to teaching or just want to improve, getting grounded in these fundamentals can help your students learn more and make your work more satisfying.
Mastering the Lesson Plan is my self-paced online course that teaches you how to build solid, engaging lesson plans and sequence them into comprehensive units of instruction. In five modules, we work through the whole planning process, from unpacking standards and writing clear objectives to designing assessments, planning engaging lessons, and meeting the needs of all students. Throughout the course, I apply these principles in detailed sample units, so you’re not just hearing abstract ideas about good teaching — you’re seeing exactly what they look like in real lesson plans.
The five modules are taught through video lessons where I walk you through the planning process like a colleague, sharing how I make decisions, where I make adjustments, and what I’ve learned about making it all work in a real classroom. As you watch, you can follow along in a printable workbook. If you have questions, you can post them in the comments right inside that lesson and an experienced teacher will respond. At the end of every module, you’ll get a “next steps” assignment to apply to your own teaching, plus a quiz to check your understanding.
And here’s what I think is the best part: The course also includes a massive library of teaching, assessment, and differentiation strategies on downloadable PDFs you can come back to whenever you need fresh ideas. So even after you’ve finished the course, you’ll have resources to support your teaching for years to come. I’m also including a collection of ready-to-use, customizable templates — unit plans, rubrics, and slide decks I designed myself — to help you get your materials together faster and in style.
If you’re ready to build a stronger foundation for your teaching, visit cultofpedagogy.com/teaching101 to learn more about Mastering the Lesson Plan.
Now here’s my conversation with Jay McTighe about performance tasks.
GONZALEZ: Hi, Jay.
MCTIGHE: Hey, Jenn. It’s great to be with you.
GONZALEZ: I’m really excited about this, because I read “Understanding by Design” way before I ever started Cult of Pedagogy. So you are really one of my original long-ago heroes of education. It’s funny, as we’ve been preparing for this interview, so many things that you’ve said, I’m just like, I knew he would say that, because I know your work pretty well. I know that seminal work very well. So I’m excited to have you on.
MCTIGHE: That’s great. Well, I consider Cult of Pedagogy as one of the best podcasts in education, so I’m honored and happy to be with you.
GONZALEZ: Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. So let’s just start by familiarizing people with who you are in this world of education. Just give me a little bit of background on you.
MCTIGHE: Okay. I have a long career. I’ll try to be brief. I started as a teacher, then became a resource teacher for gifted students in a pilot program. These are school-level jobs. Then I went to the district level and coordinated the development of gifted programs in 85 schools in a large district in Maryland. I, in the summer, directed a residential summer gifted program for nine years, which was an extraordinary experience. Then I early, mid-career left and went to the state ed department not to be a bureaucrat but because I wanted to expand some of the things that were happening in gifted education for some of the brightest kids more widely, and I had a chance to do that. But at the state level, I was put on a team charged with implementing Maryland’s first iteration of the standards movement. And that was in 1990, early ‘90s. But in conjunction with that, Maryland did a pretty innovative response to state assessments. We developed and implemented performance-based state assessments for nine years. We had no multiple-choice items on Maryland state tests during that period. It was an extraordinary shift and challenging in a lot of ways, but my own children went through Maryland schools during that era, and I saw the impact that the state performance assessments had on the kind of teaching, learning they were getting in their schools, and it was for the good.
GONZALEZ: That’s really interesting because I was a teacher in Maryland in the ‘90s, so I would have worked with students who were taking these tests too.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. It was called MSPAP, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program.
GONZALEZ: Yes. I totally remember those, yeah.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. But for a lot of reasons I won’t go into unless you want, it was unsustainable for cost reasons and timing and large scale implementation matters. But I then switched to something more in my wheelhouse, which was running the Maryland assessment consortium, which was a state collaboration of school districts where teachers came together for weeklong summer workshops designing authentic performance tasks for use in classrooms. And I really developed a lot of experience in that regard. Fast forward, “Understanding by Design” was published in 1997, and that changed the trajectory of my career, because I was getting lots of requests for speaking engagements and such. So I took an early retirement after 25 years in the Maryland public system, and the last 30 years have been writing and consulting.
GONZALEZ: Got it. And “Understanding by Design” is the book that I was referring to earlier, and correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding has always been that when we hear the term “backward design” when it comes to education, that was popularized by you and the late Grant Wiggins in that book, correct?
MCTIGHE: The short answer is yes, but I want to be clear that we didn’t invent the concept of backward design.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: Ralph Tyler in 1949, Bill Spady in the ‘80s both referenced the concept. We simply applied it, because we think it was a good idea to curriculum planning. But our key idea is understanding by design, because you can apply backward design to anything. But what does it mean to build curriculum, to teach and assess for understanding is the contributions of UBD.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And that is, we’re going to be taking a piece of this whole idea of designing curriculum and really we’re focusing on today assessment. And you and I went back and forth a little bit about what term to even use because what we were going to talk about today is performance assessment, which in my understanding is at the end of a learning cycle, there are different ways of assessing students, some of which can be a test. We, a lot of times, have some sort of a test, but then also there are more performance based ways of assessing student understanding like essays, projects, other types of things, presentations, which all can sort of fall under the larger umbrella of performance assessment. You said you would prefer to use the phrase “performance task.” So before we even get into all of that, I just want to — using the plainest language that most listeners can understand — we’re talking about not designing tests. Actually, let’s go backwards again. Your philosophy, the philosophy of backward design is that rather than planning out all of the lessons we’re going to do, and then figuring out how we’re going to measure it at the end, the whole premise of backward design is figure out what a really good assessment of learning is going to look like at the end. What do we want students to be able to know and do and demonstrate, then working backwards to plan the lessons that will guarantee success on that.
MCTIGHE: Yes. That’s correct.
GONZALEZ: So the testing part is one, but performance task is another way of measuring that.
MCTIGHE: Correct.
GONZALEZ: So that’s the piece we’re going to be talking about today. From what you’ve told me, from what I’ve observed myself, there’s a lot of performance tasks out there that are not being designed very well. And we’re going to be trying to fix that a little bit today.
MCTIGHE: That’s right.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: So let me start with my working definition of a performance task.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: A performance task is simply any learning activity and/or assessment that asks students to “perform with their learning.” They’re going to apply their learning to something, and if we use a performance task as an assessment, it will give us evidence, especially to see the extent to which students understand and can apply their learning. That’s different from what we often use and need are tests of factual information to see if they know things or skill checks to see if they can perform a given skill. Those are legitimate assessments also. But for me, the performance task, if used as an assessment, is really geared to seeing if kids understand and can apply their learning. Because we know kids might know something as in the ability to recognize it or pick the right answer from four alternatives. That doesn’t ensure that they understand it deeply or could use that learning effectively. So the performance assessments are in that space, I believe.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: But then back to the terminology, for many years I simply referred to these as performance based assessments or performance assessment tasks. But I more recently — the last decade, in fact — tried to de-emphasize the word “assessment,” and here’s why. Too often when teachers hear the word assessment, the thinking is, oh, that’s something we do at the end of teaching to get a grade. And so this is just another way of getting a grade. But I’m not going to change my teaching. I’m just going to pop a performance task on at the end. I want people to think about performance tasks up front. In other words, think about the question not what do I have to cover or what are the standards in the curriculum map, and there’s too many standards as it is, so I’ve got to go fast and cover them all. I want people to think a different question. What do I want my students to be able to do with the standards, the content they’re learning? And I want to think about a performance-based goal rather than a coverage goal.
Thus, in general, I recommend that teachers, as you noted earlier, think like an assessor before they think like a teacher. Think about your goals, think about what you want students to be able to do with their learning, formulate one or more performance tasks that will be used for assessment, but then, here’s the key thing. Present them upfront to the student. It shouldn’t be a mystery what we’re working on or why we’re learning these things.
And so here are the analogies. These are familiar. Think about the game in athletics or the play in theater, as two examples. Both of them involve authentic performance. They are complicated events. You have to put together knowledge skills, understanding on the field, on the court, or on the stage. And everybody knows what we’re working for. There’s no mystery.
What we do in practice, whether it’s for athletics or the play, we’re learning the basics, we’re memorizing our lines, we’re developing skills. But then, we’re putting it all together on opening night or on the game day. And that’s really the intent. So to summarize, I want people to think about performance tasks as rich learning activities and experiences that can build and deepen student learning, even though they’re basics, but also emphasize their application and their use, their authentic performance. So we want to frame our teaching and our curriculum around rich tasks. And yes, we will assess what they do on the task toward the end, but it’s not simply an end of teaching episode or experience.
GONZALEZ: Okay. Fantastic. Everything you’ve said, this is also going to make me happy, because this is going to be a big check on my understanding of these concepts and whether I’ve been using them in the way that I do professional development. So far we are completely lined up, especially the piece about let them know ahead of time. That, as a writing teacher, I’ve always been very upfront with rubrics and that kind of thing at the very beginning. It’s all very transparent. So it’s just good to hear you emphasize that.
MCTIGHE: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So we thought that a good way of starting this conversation, once we got the definition down, would be for you to walk us through three examples of well-designed performance tasks. And then kind of back up and break down how these fit in with a set of criteria when teachers are looking to design them themselves.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. Let’s follow that sequence.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: So I’m going to present three tasks. They’re from different grade levels. They’re different a little bit in scope, how long they are, etc. But through these three examples, I’ll be able to extract underlying principles and characteristics of good tasks. And then we can talk about how do you design them and avoid predictable or common mistakes. So here are the three tasks. I’ll keep these brief, although I could go into more detail. The first one I call state tour. And this would be a good task in conjunction with a study of any state, history, geography, but it could also be applied if you’re studying another country or a region. So here’s the essence of it. The state department of tourism has asked your help in planning a four-day tour of your state for a group of visitors. Plan the tour to help the visitors understand the state’s history, geography, and its key economic assets. You should prepare a written itinerary, including an explanation of why each site was included on your tour.
GONZALEZ: I love that. Okay.
MCTIGHE: Right? And again, to the earlier point, if I were teaching Maryland state history or wherever I might be teaching, I would present that task early on, if not on the first day of the unit.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So in three or four weeks, the kids would not only know they would be doing it, but as they’re learning about the state, they’re thinking about their tour. In other words, it will enhance their learning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, right. Yes, okay.
MCTIGHE: So here’s No. 2. I call this responsible citizen. I also picked one, this one is pretty generic. You could use this with upper elementary through high school. It’s called responsible citizen. You have an idea that you believe will make your school or community better. And you want to convince school or community leaders that they should act on your idea. So the task involves identifying a need or an existing problem, describe your idea, explain how it will improve the school or the community or address the problem, make the case for your audience. And the audience could be a principal, board of ed, city council, state representative. Your idea and plan basically is to solicit approval and funding to support your idea, and you can communicate to your target audience through a letter, a proposal, or a presentation.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And so that sounds like it is a problem an English language arts or maybe even a cross-disciplinary, but it’s going to utilize a lot of English language arts skills because the output is a piece of writing, whether it’s a spoken piece or whatever. Right?
MCTIGHE: That’s true, and you gave me a good opportunity to inject one characteristic right now, given your observation.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: I contend that a good performance task needs two fundamental components: Some application of learning to some new situation and some explanation. Show your reasoning, justify your claim, support your argument, support your inference with evidence from text. It’s the twin processes of application and explanation that give us the evidence to convict a student of understanding, because they’re going to assume they’re innocent until convicted.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So to that point then, because there’s an explanation component, almost every good task involves some communication, which is in the English language arts world. It may be written, often is written, it might be oral presentation or delivery, but it could be multimedia communication. But in this example, I would say, I would think of it more as a government or civics. And for schools in districts that have a profile of a graduate, often those POGs include responsible citizenship as an outcome.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: This fits right in there, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: Yeah, so keep that characteristic in mind.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Now the third task is one of my favorites, and it makes another point, which I’ll emphasize afterward, but here’s the task. High school mathematics. I got this example from a teacher of ninth grade where in their math curriculum, they have a strand of statistics, which I think is an important aspect of high school or even all mathematics. In this particular short unit, kids are introduced to measures of central tendency: Mean, median, mode, standard deviation.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Here’s the task: Presented at the beginning of the marking period. Your math teacher will allow you to select the measure of central tendency — mean, median, or mode — by which your quarterly grade will be calculated. Review your quizzes, tests, homework, grades, to decide which measure of central tendency will be best for your situation. Write a note to your teacher explaining why you selected your preferred method.
GONZALEZ: That is brilliant. I love that.
MCTIGHE: Isn’t that cool?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: And so let me riff on that for its features that I wanted to highlight.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: No. 1, we talk about authenticity, and I’m an advocate for trying to make our tasks as authentic as possible. Why? Because we know if kids see purpose, authenticity, they see relevance for what they’re being asked to learn, they’re more likely to put forth effort into it. This task is relevant to kids. It’s in their interest to understand the content of measures of central tendency.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: And by the way, the teacher told me, I said the same thing you did, I said, “This is brilliant. Can I share it with others?” He said, “Of course.” And I said, “Well, tell me, why did you start doing this? And what’s been the effect?” He said, “Well, look, most ninth graders have no interest in mean, median, mode.” He said, “So just out of desperation, I decided to try this, and I announced it, and guess what, kids wanted to understand what this was, because they saw it as relevant to them.”
But think about it as an assessment, it’s application. You have to apply this statistical concept to your particular grade spread, and you have to explain why in my case I might say mode is better, because I bombed a quiz, and that zero would really affect if I used mean as the calculating measure.
So it’s brilliant because it’s authentic. It’s engaging to kids. It makes them want to learn the content. As an assessment, it’s rich and valid. And the last component that I wanted to highlight was it’s short. Some teachers think a performance task has to be this four-week interdisciplinary mega thing that dies of its own complexity or time. And that’s not the case. You can have authentic — but short nonetheless — rich, relevant tasks that engage learners and can provide evidence of understanding. And this is a particularly short one, but it’s in the mix.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. That’s fantastic. And that was where we were going to be going next with these three examples was that you actually had a set of criteria. And is that what they are? The relevance, the validity, and then the brevity?
MCTIGHE: So let me go through that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So the first is something I mentioned, I’ll just highlight. A rich performance task, especially when used for assessment, needs to involve application and explanation, and all three tasks have that quality.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Secondly, I recommend as much as possible we set the task in a “authentic or realistic situation.” Now, in the case of the state tour, you’re not really hired by the state tourism board, but you’re doing things that somebody in that role would in fact do, right? And you have an audience, even if it’s a hypothetical audience. We have to introduce people who’ve never been to our state to its key features. So it may be a simulated authentic situation, but I think that’s worthwhile.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: Thirdly, the tasks are open-ended. There’s not a single correct answer to any of those three tasks. That’s not to say that knowledge is unimportant. Of course it is. You can’t do any of those tasks if you don’t know certain things. But these tasks go beyond, as an assessment, go beyond assessing rote learning. You can have a test on Maryland history, but that doesn’t mean you understand and could do the state tour task, right? You could have kids memorize definitions of measures of central tendency, but really not understand what they mean in real application.
GONZALEZ: Absolutely, yes.
MCTIGHE: Fourthly, the call for what some refer to as HOT: Higher order thinking. If you look at the prompts in good tasks, the verbs are going to signal this. You’re going to see tasks like apply, design, solve, analyze, create, evaluate, defend, teach, argue, critique. Those involve higher order skills, and I contend that we use those kinds of thinking skills to build understanding, and we use them to assess understanding through our tasks. So as kids are working on the tasks, they’re engaged with those higher order skills tied to content, tied to application, and we can also then assess what they do on the task to see, again, can they apply their learning, are they engaged in thinking, and can they explain what they’ve done.
GONZALEZ: Can I ask you a super quick question on that?
MCTIGHE: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Sometimes I’ve seen Blooms separated into three and three, you know? Like, the top three are considered higher order, the bottom three are not. But apply is just one level up from the remember level. And I’ve seen a lot of application tasks that are fairly rich, and yet I feel like that gets dumped in the bottom and not considered. So I’m just curious what your opinion is, because I do think it’s a matter of opinion sometimes.
MCTIGHE: With all do reference to Benjamin Bloom who is just a giant intellect in our profession, I think the taxonomy is not as well suited to looking at performance tasks as is, say, depth of knowledge, the DOK framework.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: I could talk a lot about it, but I’ll give you the short version. Depth of knowledge I prefer as a construct because it’s four levels, it’s four categories, if you will, that describe the cognitive complexity of an assignment or a task. And for me, with two exceptions, performance tasks, I believe, should be at Level 3 of DOK. Level 3 of DOK involves, they’re mutli-step. They engage more cognitive complexity than recall or just basic comprehension. They involve application. They require explanation or justification. Those to me are the qualities of a good, rich performance task. By the way, Level 4 of DOK, which is much more complex and may involve more creativity and more student direction, is the provenance for project-based learning, PBLs.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: And I could talk more about that, if you want. But since we’re focusing on performance tasks, my general recommendation is I’d prefer not to use Bloom or not to get caught up in the categories of that construct. I use depth of knowledge and focus your tasks on Level 3. That’s the cognitive complexity where they should reside.
GONZALEZ: Perfect. That gives me a lot of springboard for my own personal digging into things. So yeah. Because I know Blooms better than I know DOK, and I’ve been meaning to get into it a little more. We’ll do that another time.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. Here’s the two exceptions, just since I mentioned them. For kids in pre-K, K, and 1, or beginning a language, like first-year Spanish for the first couple of months, you’re not going to have, in general, Level 3 tasks with very young or very beginning level learners.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Levels 1 and 2 are appropriate. But even over the course of a year in first grade, and in Spanish I, I would hope teachers are getting into the Level 3 toward the end of the year as some of the basic skills are more developed.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. So you’ve given me, I believe, four criteria. Is that all of them?
MCTIGHE: Oh no. We’re continuing here.
GONZALEZ: Okay, let’s keep going.
MCTIGHE: Because the tasks are open-ended, there’s not a single correct answer. We need a basis for evaluation, and that, of course as you know, is evaluative criteria and/or more detailed rubrics.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: So some people dismiss open-ended tasks by saying, oh, they’re too subjective, so I can’t use them. And my response is, oh, come on. We have judgment in the Olympics for diving and figure skating, etc. Rather than calling them too subjective, I would prefer to say, look, we are making judgments. These are judgment-based evaluations, but it’s not just whatever you think. It’s based on agreed upon criteria tied to our goals.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: And a well-developed rubric, interestingly enough, should be more a reflection of the learning goals first than the particulars of the given task, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: That’s backward design.
GONZALEZ: The goals should be built from the standards, then the tasks comes from the, yeah.
MCTIGHE: But the criteria should also be derived from the standards.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Would you be able to, from these three different performance task examples, think of one example like criteria that would be on one of those rubrics? Do you know what I mean? To maybe help us understand this.
MCTIGHE: Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: I get what you’re saying, but this might be a new idea for some people.
MCTIGHE: Yeah, sure. So let me pick the middle task, which was probably the richest and more involved, it was longer: Responsible citizen. There are multiple skills, I believe, embedded in that task. One is research. You’ve got to research a problem or a situation that needs attention. You’ve got to define the problem. So there’s some research and information gathering. You’ve got to formulate essentially an argument and a solution to the proposed problem or your suggestion for making an improvement. You’ve got to convince people of your proposal, and you have to communicate effectively. And so that task potentially could have several rubrics. One for research or problem definition. One for laying out your argument or your case, and then how effectively you’ve communicated that to your target audience.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: Now potentially you could embed those into an analytic single rubric or you might separate them.
GONZALEZ: Right, okay. I’m with you.
MCTIGHE: But there are multiple criteria there. And by the way, there’s richness. If you go back to the standards, the ability to find and evaluate information through research, problem solving and problem finding, argumentation, and effective communication, those are the big ones.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: And by the way, here’s just a sidebar. Argumentation, the ability to develop, support, and critique argument, is found in four main standard areas, right? It’s in English language arts, it’s in history, social studies. It’s in science, it’s in mathematics. That’s a high yield competency. And yet, think about most state tests. They don’t do a good job evaluating research, argumentation, communication in any kind of rich way. Does that mean we shouldn’t teach them? Oh, on the contrary. We should be assessing those because the state test can’t.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: We need to complement what the state can do on its multiple-choice measure in a way that honors all the goals, not just the ones easiest to test and grade.
GONZALEZ: And you know what I’ve found when I tried to show teachers this pathway from standard to rubric criteria, is that a lot of times the language of the standard has been worked over so long by a bunch of teachers that it’s almost the exact language you would use in the criteria on a rubric anyway.
MCTIGHE: Absolutely.
GONZALEZ: It’s done for you. Right? Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Absolutely. And that falls under the mantra that I like to advocate of no mysteries, no excuses.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Kids ought to know what the learning goal is, why we’re doing it, how their work will be evaluated, and don’t tell me at the end, oh, I didn’t know you wanted a bibliography. And that brings clarity, which by the way is one of John Hattie’s notable factors impacting learning: Teacher clarity and student clarity about goals and evaluations. The last couple of points. So I’ve given you the main ones.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: But there’s some optional ones to consider, and there’s some variables that are in the mix. So options, and maybe variables in tasks. One is student choice. When the tasks are open-ended, there’s more opportunity to give appropriate choice. You can’t give choice on everything, but if you’re clear about your goals, for instance, writing. If your goal is argumentation or narrative or expository writing, well, particularly the first two, you can give kids some choice on the topic, the issue, the audience, etc., and still get evidence of their ability to effectively communicate in writing in that genre.
In the responsible citizen task, that was open-ended. The kids, with maybe some approval, could pick the topic or the issue or the problem they wanted to work on. They selected their target audience, and they had a little bit of choice in how they communicated. Now if you’re only a writing teacher, you might not give them, you can’t do it visually or through a podcast, but you might give them even some choice of writing. It could be a policy brief, an email, a post on Facebook, even within the genre.
GONZALEZ: Right, because it’s different kinds of output, but yeah. Even a presentation or a video has a script to it. You’re still saying words, and they have to be organized, yeah.
MCTIGHE: Exactly, yeah. And don’t we know that one of the factors that motivates students is not only relevance, but the opportunity to work toward their strengths and have some choice. And so we can build those in. That doesn’t mean you have to, but it’s an option.
GONZALEZ: Right, yes.
MCTIGHE: Another variable that’s a big one is time. How long will these tasks take? Because one of the big pushbacks as you well know is the teacher says, “Oh, that task could take a week. I’ve got too much content to cover.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: I like the making the grade one because it’s so short and sweet. The state tour task, depending on how it was orchestrated, might take a couple of days or periods for students to work on, but I would say the time is well spent. And the responsible citizen task, again, could potentially be longer, particularly if you’re going to have the kids present their proposals. But once again, the richness of the skills they’re working on, I would argue, is the juice is worth the squeeze, in that regard.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: But those are variables. My general recommendation to teachers is if you’re new to using performance tasks, and/or your students are not familiar or experienced with dealing with open-ended tasks, start with shorter tasks, more manageable, more teacher directed. But over time, I’d propose — and by the way, and over the grades as well — we should be expanding the task to become a little longer, more complex, often multidisciplinary, and increasingly student directed.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Because I would argue or do argue that one of our long-term goals in education is developing student independence and autonomy. But I have to tell you, Jenn, and you know this from your career, too often, especially, you look at high school and you look at assignments or projects or tasks, often they’re so highly detailed and directed by the teacher that it’s not really a genuine, authentic challenge. It’s a color by number kind of equation. It’s compliance.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: You see it often in science labs that are supposed to be science investigations, but it’s so cookbook that you can go through without doing much thinking. And the teacher’s telling you what to do every step of the way, in the worst cases. We’re not building student autonomy if we hand feed them or spoon feed them or direct every moment of their action.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: I argue we should map the curriculum, not just around standards but around tasks. And if you looked vertically within and across subject areas, you should see tasks that are becoming increasingly complex, authentic, and require increasing student autonomy as we go up the grades. And we’re doing it by design. If you want, I’ll send you an article that I’ve written about that, and you can put it in the show notes.
GONZALEZ: Absolutely that would be perfect. In terms of the criteria for effective performance tasks, you’ve got one more.
MCTIGHE: It’s a consideration, not a criteria.
GONZALEZ: Got it.
MCTIGHE: Okay?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So the one last point I’ll make is that a variable has to do with the extent to which the task is going to be subject-specific or involve more than one discipline. And as I mentioned previously, if we consider a task involving application and explanation, the explanation part involves some communication. So even tasks in science, math, history, social studies, physical education, the arts, could in fact or should in fact have a communication component that gets into the English language arts arena. But the richer and the more authentic the tasks, the more likely it’s going to be to bring in more than one subject area. Just because in real life, most real issues or problems aren’t centered in a single subject silo. They are multi-disciplinary.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: That doesn’t mean you have to have them as such, but it’s worthwhile to look to opportunities to help kids see interdisciplinary connections.
GONZALEZ: Right. Okay. What we’re going to talk about next is common mistakes that you see teachers making when they are designing these performance tasks.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. A couple of things I’ve seen over my long career. One is often teachers get excited by building an authentic, realistic situation for kids, both as a learning experience and something they will assess. But in our enthusiasm, sometimes what I’ve seen is the tasks become too big, too complex, maybe multidisciplinary and thus become difficult to manage. So I like to say think big but start small.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: Build tasks that are shorter, more teacher directed. And related to that, a teacher might have an ambitious, interesting long-term two or three week project type task, but the students may not have the expertise or more importantly the experience to be able to manage such an open-ended learning or assessment, if they’ve never had it in the past.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: So one mistake is going too big, even with all good intentions. Another one has to do with a rubric. Often I see rubrics, particularly the ones you can grab from online, that are product or performance specific. So here’s a rubric if you’re making a mobile, or here’s a rubric for a play or an animated video.
But what is often seen in those, what I call generic rubrics, are a focus on the surface features of the product, but absent the content. And so that goes to the point we mentioned earlier, you brought it up. A rubric should be derived from our goals, from the standards, and should reflect the important content. There’s nothing wrong with criteria associated with the qualities of the product, but as a quick example, if you’re asking students to do an illustrated diagram in science to illustrate a scientific process, you should emphasize the accuracy and depth of the explanation of the content, and not fixate on how well they colored or their visual composition.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Absolutely.
MCTIGHE: Unless you’re cooperating with the art teacher and he or she would have their own separate criteria.
GONZALEZ: Exactly. I’m thinking if this is a graphic design class or in the case of an animated video, if you’re in an animation class, then yes, that’s what you’re actually assessing for. But if it’s the content and the information, then that stuff should be a very tiny, minuscule part. The way that I’ve often advised teachers to put that kind of stuff on a rubric is that it should be a tiny part of the grade, and only in terms of do these errors interfere with understanding? Is it so bad that people can’t — you know what I mean?
MCTIGHE: That’s exactly right. Otherwise you get into the count on your finger rubric. So if you make four mistakes, you can only get a two.
GONZALEZ: Right, exactly. And some mistakes aren’t the same.
MCTIGHE: I like to call those impact criteria, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So you made minor calculation errors, but it didn’t affect the overall problem-solving design. Or you had a few grammar and spelling errors, but your message nonetheless comes through, or your errors were so significant it violated your goal.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: That’s impact.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Became a distraction then, yeah.
MCTIGHE: Exactly.
GONZALEZ: And then a third mistake is really more instructional, but it’s an important consideration, and I’m going to pose this as a question. Or actually, preceding the question, if teachers are using a performance task as an end of teaching assessment, and they haven’t necessarily front-end loaded, or even if they’ve introduced it at the beginning, here’s the cautionary note. And I’ll frame it as a question for athletics. Think about how coaches of team sports prepare their players for the game. What do they do in practice and preparation for the game? Well, kids have to learn the rules. There’s content knowledge.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MCTIGHE: You can’t play if you don’t know the rules, especially with younger kids. They have to learn the rules. You’re working on skills, both individual and team skills, and a lot of practice is practicing skills. But there’s one more thing that coaches do that teachers may omit, and that is they have a scrimmage. What is a scrimmage? A scrimmage is game-like conditions but done in practice. Essentially it’s a formative assessment where the coach is giving you feedback on game-like conditions, right?
GONZALEZ: Okay, yeah.
MCTIGHE: And the theater equivalent is dress rehearsal. No director would have the kids go on stage on opening night if they never did a dress rehearsal. And no coach would let the kids go into the game for the first time if they never had scrimmages in practice. But that’s the piece that too often teachers will miss. It’s like, well, we worked on all the skills that they need, so they should be able to put it all together in the final task. But that’s not always the case. So I always encourage teachers to think about the equivalent of a scrimmage or a dress rehearsal. Formative assessment in preparation and for the game, right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: And it can take some straightforward forms. One, maybe we’ll do a mini task, a simplified version, and the teacher will be a think-aloud guide. You’re going to watch me work this through. Or it might be a group. You’re going to work with a group, and I’m going to give you feedback as you’re working on this similar kind of scrimmage. Those are the preparatory moves that kids are going to need in order to put it all together on their own.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MCTIGHE: In other words, just adding up a bunch of knowledge and skill lessons doesn’t automatically equip kids to put it all together in an authentic application.
GONZALEZ: Right, right. You need to be able to sort of simulate that final performance in some smaller ways, yes.
MCTIGHE: Yeah. And the teacher says, oh, I use formative assessment. I do an exit slip once a week. That’s not a scrimmage.
GONZALEZ: No, it’s not. I love this metaphor of the scrimmage. I think that’s going to lock in with a lot of people in a way that other descriptions may not have ever done.
MCTIGHE: And I’ll give you one more part of this analogy. It goes back to my earlier point about thinking about your content and your curriculum as preparing kids for authentic application, not just coverage. I’ve never heard an athletic coach say to me, “Jay, I don’t have time for those games. They take all afternoon. How can I ever cover my playbook?” Right? But you hear the equivalent, understandably because teachers are pressed to cover all the standards.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MCTIGHE: It might be on the state test. My humble opinion is our job is not to cover the playbook. The playbook is a resource. The game is what we’re preparing for. And I believe, even with standards and how prominent they are in the states, we need to recognize the standards are an overly ambitious list of things kids ideally will learn, but they’re not the game. Let’s keep the game in mind, and let’s use the standards, the textbook, and other resources as the playbook. We don’t have to cover them point by point or in some unrealistic sequence.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So before we wrap up, anything else you want to share with us about this topic?
MCTIGHE: The only thing would be some thoughts about how we design such tasks.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: So I’ve outlined the characteristics that for me are the qualities that we want to see in rich, authentic tasks. Again, to be used to support learning but also can be used to assess student understanding and transfer. So how do we build such tasks? A couple of thoughts. Grant Wiggins and I have developed an acronym called GRASPS, and it can be used to frame out the authentic elements of a task, once you have the basic idea of what you want to assess through the performance tasks. So the G refers to goal, and the goal is for the student. Your goal is to introduce visitors to our state. Your goal is to convince the board of ed to adopt your solution to a school problem. Your goal is to tell your math teacher which measure of central tendency will give you the best grade. There’s a Role, which is real or simulated. Your role is an advisor to the Maryland tourism agency. The role can be for themselves. Your job is to tell your math teacher your grade calculation.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: The S is the situation, as authentic as possible. The S is situation. The A is audience. Who is your audience? Real or simulated. The P of GRASPS refers to the product or performance. What will you make or do to fulfill the task?
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: And the S at the end refers to the success criteria.
GONZALEZ: Got it.
MCTIGHE: So this is simply a framing device that can be used to build greater authenticity into the task directions.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And it’s a nice place to start for a teacher who’s just not sure, how do I even begin to design this? It’s a little checklist of, okay, what do you want to do? Let’s look at these different buckets.
MCTIGHE: Exactly. And we could go back through it, but I won’t. Each of the tasks that I described to you was built using GRASPS.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MCTIGHE: You could go in and say, what’s the goal, what’s the audience, what’s the product, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Now here’s a cool related part to task design, and it goes to both task and rubric. I call it an alignment check. If you’re drafting out a performance task and associated rubric, give the task or rubric to another teacher or a team, and ask them to tell you by only looking at those things what are the goals being taught and assessed through this? Do you see how that works?
GONZALEZ: Oh, absolutely, yeah. You don’t get to explain it to them at all, yeah.
MCTIGHE: No. And if the rubric is focusing on surface features, they’re going to say, well, it seems you’re after grammar, spelling, mechanics, or good visual composition.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: And you say, no, I’m the science teacher. I want them to explain some science process. Well, I don’t see that as a viewer. That’s great feedback to you as a task designer.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. I mean, I’m loving the idea in general of handing any assignment to another educator and saying, “Try this. Tell me. How would you view this? Does it make sense? Is it clear?”
MCTIGHE: It’s more than that. It’s, what are the goals that this is working toward?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Can you see it? And by the way, that’s a backward design move, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Because if you think about backward design at three stages, starting with the learning goals in Stage 1. Stage 2 is the assessment evidence we’re going to collect to see if kids are achieving those goals. Stage 3 is teaching learning plan. You can give anything in Stage 2 or 3. You could give your lesson plan for a week to another teacher and say, what do you think the goals are? What are the standards being assessed here?
GONZALEZ: Oh, yeah.
MCTIGHE: It’s powerful.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: Now one other quick point I want to make about goals. I’ve kind of hit a little bit my concern that because there’s so much content jammed into standards, and Bob Marzano signaled this in his famous research summary when he said we need a guaranteed and “viable” curriculum. His word viable was a reference to something every teacher knows. There’s too much content in most standards and not enough time to teach it all.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MCTIGHE: So hence my emphasis on don’t fixate on covering everything, because that can lead to superficial learning that doesn’t last. Focus on what you want students to do with their learning, build your teaching and your curriculum and your assessment around rich tasks, and kids are going to need to know the basics to do the tasks. You’re not sacrificing knowledge and skills, but you’re not fixating on just covering long lists of often discrete standards.
GONZALEZ: Yes. If people would like to learn more from you, and I think they definitely should, tell me where they can go online, and then also you’ve got your book that I’d like you to share too.
MCTIGHE: Yes. So my website is just my name, www.jaymctighe.com. The book that references this particular podcast is called “Designing Authentic Performance Tasks and Projects.” And the subtitle is important: “To Promote Meaningful Learning and Assess What Matters Most.”
To read a full transcript of this interview and find links to the book and articles we discussed, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 283. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.