November 17th
High School
Pre-Work
The purposes of your pre-work are to prepare you to share the text your team selected and to build some knowledge around creating a sequence of tasks. For your pre-work, we’d like to ask you to do two things:
1. Work with your school team to complete a Google Slide that describes the text you selected using the rubric from October.
2. Read the excerpt from the chapter, “Collaborative Professional Development to Create Cognitively Demanding Tasks in English Language Arts.” After you have read the chapter, please draft a quick write in response to the following:
· What is one big takeaway about creating tasks from this text?
· What questions are you left with?
You’ll be sharing your quick write when we come together at 6:00 pm.
Please work with your school team to create a slide that describes the text you selected using the rubric from your October Bridge to Practice.
Cognitively Demanding Tasks
Please read the linked text and then compose a quick write in reponse to the following:
What is one big takeaway about creating tasks from this text?
What questions are you left with?
Materials for our Work Together
Please work with your parnter to complete a slide based on your discussion.
Working as a School Team to Create an Arc of Questions
Task Sheet: Creating Questions
Please work with your school team to complete the task sheet. As you write each question, take a step back and work on the response for that question. After working on each response, talk about:
Is the question you created truly text-based? In other words, does it require students to work with evidence from across the text to respond to the question or can the question be answered without having read the text or having read the whole text?
Is the question cognitively demanding? Do students need to grapple with the content of the text to respond or is the question just hard to answer (hard for an adult or hard for a student)?
Resources for Writing Questions
Sample Sequences of Questions
Example of scaffolding without reducing the cognitive demand
Base Task Sheet
Scaffolded Reading
Bridge to Practice
The purpose of this bridge to practice is for you to continue to work on the questions that you've developed for the text you've selected.
Continue to develop questions if you did not finish crafting questions during our session.
Revise the questions as needed based on the feedback you received on any continued discussions you have with your school team during your PLC.
Try your hand at crafting a comprehension task sheet. You'll have an opporutnity to share the task sheet with the group when we meet again in January.
Please let us know if you have any questions and have a great break!
Sara, Glenn, & Tony