Tasks for Teachers - A tagged, reusable, open-licensed collection of teaching tasks

This project aims to collect and compile a searchable database of teaching tasks suitable for all subject areas, ages, and levels.

An instructor preparing for a class should be able to look for e.g. an interactive exercise for an intermediate French class on talking about films, or a pair group activity for university students learning about Vygotsky, or a large group exercise using mobile technology for primary school students learning about outdoor education, or a five-minute warm-up activity for a history lesson on the French Revolution and quickly find a list of corresponding tasks to choose from.

Looking through the different task categories and example activities should also be a useful starting point for instructors wanting to design their own tasks for specific purposes.

Although it originally began as a list of tasks for language education, this project is intended to be generally useful to teachers in any discipline or subject area, and contributions of any and all educational tasks are welcome.

Background

Tasks are a fundamental component of communicative language teaching, and yet teachers are surprisingly reticent to share the tasks they have used successfully with learners. Many teachers inherit binders of photocopied worksheets and task organizers that they guard jealously in fear of the possibility that students of other teachers might also be able to enjoy a positive learning experience in their classes. Increased scrutiny of and resulting competition among educators likely plays a large role in the unwillingness of teachers to share their tasks with each other.

Reasons why teachers don't share tasks

There are several often-raised objections to sharing tasks:

1. Context-specific: Tasks are usually designed for specific learning outcomes in specific circumstances and they would not be effective if copied or used by other instructors in different contexts.
2. Everyone knows how to make their own: The lack of resources (particularly freely-licensed electronic databases) containing lists of tasks is irrelevant because educators learn about the principles of task-design during their mandatory teacher education programs, and any teacher should thereafter be capable of designing tasks appropriate for their individual needs and context.
3. There are tons of resources already: Since there are already so many books available on task design, and also collections of activities for teachers, all anyone needs to do is go to the library or buy a book to find the information they need. It's all in there, somewhere.
4. Sharing is bad for teachers: Educators face increasing pressure to submit to regimes of scrutiny, reporting, evaluation, and assessment, and to compete with other educators for access to precious resources, seniority, and job security. The activities teachers are able to provide for their students are one important way that teachers can stand out from the crowd, and sharing them will result in fewer job opportunities and loss of advantages earned from having designed unique and outstanding tasks.
5. Sharing is bad for innovation: Increased competition should result in increased innovation as educators strive to design the best and most unique tasks and activities for their students, making their classes and teaching methods stand out from others, and creating motivation for other teachers to try harder.
6. Sharing is bad for students: If there is a lack of innovation resulting from teachers all having access to descriptions of tasks, students will suffer as they will end up doing the same exercise over and over again in every class they ever take. It might even also be bad for them because they could look up the tasks themselves if they were openly available, and then teachers would lose the element of surprise, which is so critical to successful implementation of tasks.

Reasons why tasks should be shared anyway

1. Modification is easy, creation is difficult: Even though many tasks are designed for specific learning outcomes in specific circumstances, it is often much easier to adjust or modify an existing task to fit a given learning context than it would be to create something similar from scratch. Sometimes all that's needed is a bit of inspiration or a suggestion to indicate what might be possible.
2. Not everyone knows how to do what you do: An important point to remember is that many many people who are tasked with standing in front of a class have not had formal pedagogical training. In many parts of the world, whoever knows a little about the subject matter may be pressed into service as a teacher, whether they have any training or experience or not. Then there is the fact that even among the people who have been formally trained, experiences and contexts can differ widely, and others could very easily have been exposed to quite different educational theories or pedagogical practices. You can never make any assumptions about what people (even teachers!) do and do not know.
3. Not everyone has access to the same resources: One goal of establishing an open database of tasks is to translate them into other languages and contexts. Not everyone has access to libraries, academic book stores, or even Amazon. Not to mention that the information in books is extremely difficult to access in modular ways, or in mobile or other contexts. If you need a list of good activities for a class of adults, at intermediate level, from a particular region, and targetting a particular skill, and you need it ASAP, then you are probably out of luck. If you need to teach a chemistry lesson to a group of beginners and halfway through you discover that most of them do not share your native language, you are similarly on your own.
4. Sharing is good for teachers: Institutional pressures and lack of resources affect all teachers, and competing with each other neither increases actual job security nor the perceived quality of any individual educator's classroom performance. The idea that hiding information from each other is good for teachers' careers is an illusion.
5. Sharing is good for innovation: It's much easier to innovate when you have a sense of what others have done before. Otherwise you are bound to waste time and energy recreating the wheel rather than innovating or thinking of ways to do things differently.
6. Sharing is good for students: Better tasks mean a better learning experience for students, and more likelihood that they can engage in meaningful learning activities rather than being exposed only to dry readings, PowerPoints, and lectures. And the learning value of a high-quality task should not be compromised by advance knowledge of what you are about to do (e.g., you might know exactly what a jigsaw activity is and how it works, but you might still find it to be an extremely valuable learning experience to engage in).

Finally, perhaps the most important reason to share tasks and other practices: you might learn something. Do you know what kinds of activities other teachers are using in China, Sweden, Brazil, or the United States? What about teachers of physics, French, biology, advanced calculus? Surely there is the possibility that some of those activities could be adapted to your needs and improve your students learning experiences?

Not sharing leads to siloization and mistrust; on the other hand, sharing freely can improve the quality of your teaching, as well as bettering learning outcomes for students around the world.

What is a task?

Ellis (2003) outlines the following criteria for communicative language tasks:

1. A task is a workplan
2. A task involves a primary focus on meaning
3. A task involves real-world processes of language use
4. A task can involve any of the four language skills
5. A task engages cognitive processes
6. A task has a clearly defined communicative outcome

Since we are generalizing tasks to cover learning activities in any subject area, not just language learning, the final point ("A task has a clearly defined communicative outcome") can be modified as appropriate -- the goal may not necessarily be communication, but it should probably be related to using or applying some piece of relevant subject knowledge to do something in the real world.

Sources of task ideas

• Workshops: Teachers attend professional development seminars and workshops to learn about new ways of teaching and new ways of conducting activities
• Professional literature: There are many books, articles and other resources describing the principles of task design
• Learning experience: When preparing to teach, instructors may think back to their own experience of being a student, adapting or reusing activities and exercises that were effective for them in the past
• Other teachers: The proverbial binder full of activities and worksheets left behind by the previous person who taught a particular class

Target audience

Examples of the kinds of people who could be in the position of needing to teach but who may not have access to formal teacher education and therefore might benefit from the information in this repository:

• Corporate trainers
• People conducting workshops or seminars
• Graduate student teachers
• Teaching assistants
• College/University-level instructors
• Volunteer teachers
• Heritage language teachers
• Student teachers / teacher candidates

Structure of the project

Tasks are arranged in several top level folders: categories, activities, examples.

A distinction has made here between general task categories (overarching notions or design principles guiding the creation of more specific exercises), more specific activities that apply those principles, and individual examples of use in a particular context / to teach a particular subject matter.

For example, a category of tasks might be "jigsaw". There are many variations on jigsaw activities, but the overarching concept and principles would be described in a file called jigsaw.md in the categories folder. The different variations of jigsaw activity would then be described in several different files in the activities folder, e.g.:

• one_level_jigsaw.md
• two_level_jigsaw.md
• multi_level_jigsaw.md
• etc.

Finally, specific examples of using jigsaw activities for a particular subject area would be kept in the examples folder, e.g.:

• jigsaw_for_chemistry.md
• jigsaw_for_modern_language_education.md
• jigsaw_for_drama.md
• etc.

These three groups are linked together by tags: At the bottom of each file (e.g.¸ jigsaw.md, one_level_jigsaw.md, and jigsaw_for_chemistry) there should be the following line:

Category: Jigsaw

Similarly, the files in the examples folder should contain an additional tag linking to the activity they implement, e.g.:

Category: Jigsaw
Activity: One level jigsaw

Style guidelines

Voice

For the sake of consistency, tasks should be described imperatively (i.e., "Separate the class into groups of three") rather than e.g., third person ("The instructor first separates the class into groups of three...") or first person ("First I usually separate the class into groups of three...").

Tags

In addition to Category and Activity tags, an unlimited number of additional tags can be added to the bottom of example files to aid discoverability. These should be listed using the tag Tags: and separated by commas. For example:

Tags: Kids, Primary, Math, Small groups

If the task has accommodations for second language learners (which is always a good idea), it can be tagged as LL (for Language Learners), and/or a more specific tag (e.g., ELL for English Language Learners, FLL for French Language Learners, CLL for Chinese Language Learners, etc.).

Examples of general tags could be tasks for adults, beginner calculus, heritage language learning, workshop, high school, literature, outdoor education, seminar, technology, games, history, coding, etc.

Multiple tags can be combined to categorize tasks for specific purposes, e.g.:

Tags: history, high school, large groups, Canadian history, Second World War, Dieppe

Resources

Try to provide links to any additional resources that might be required to use the task in a classroom. Examples of such resources could be documents for further reading, multimedia, related websites etc. For ease of reference these should be listed towards the bottom of the file in a separate Links or Resources section.

Images

Images can be included to illustrate the text using the standard Markdown image syntax (![Image label](http://image_url.jpg)). Please make sure to provide attribution for all images.

If a freely-licensed image is available or can be created, it may be considered for inclusion in the repo itself. If enough freely licensed images are collected, it may be a good idea to create a separate repo for them.

References

Selected books on Task-Based Language Teaching:

• Ahmadian, M. J., & García Mayo, M. del P. (2017). Recent perspectives on task-based language learning and teaching. In Recent Perspectives on Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. De Gruyter Mouton. http://www.degruyter.com/view/title/514571
• Barkley, E. F., Cross, K. P., & Major, C. H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. Jossey-Bass.
• Crookes, G., & Gass, S. M. (Eds.). (1993). Tasks and language learning: Integrating theory and practice. Multilingual Matters.
• Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford University Press.
• Ellis, R. (2018). Reflections on task-based language teaching. Channel View Publications.
• Johnson, K. (2003). Designing language teaching tasks. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596672
• Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nunan, D. (1989). Designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Cambridge University Press.
• Nunan, D., & Nunan, D. (2004). Task-based language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
• Parrott, M. (1993). Tasks for language teachers: A resource book for training and development. Cambridge University Press.
• Pozzi, F., & Persico, D. (Eds.). (2010). Techniques for fostering collaboration in online learning communities: Theoretical and practical perspectives. Information Science Reference.
• Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E. W. (2000). Teacher's handbook: Contextualized language instruction (2nd ed). Heinle & Heinle.
• Thomas, M., & Reinders, H. (Eds.). (2010). Task-based language learning and teaching with technology. Continuum.
• van den Branden, K. (Ed.). (2006). Task-based language education: From theory to practice. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667282
• Willis, D., & Willis, J. R. (2011). Doing task-based teaching (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

See the Bibliography for a more complete list of books and articles on using tasks in teaching.

License

MIT (See LICENSE file for details).