A New Way To Empower Learners With Relevant Tasks

                                                                                         Bishnu Paneru

There has been a wider discussion on current teaching learning activities and assignments.
All the stakeholders of education believe that education should provide knowledge, skills and
attitude which needs help them to live life happily. We can see students are assigned a lot of
tasks/work at school and to do at home. Here we are discussing what type of tasks will be
fruitful which could be provided by the teachers or parents. 

Traditional tasks are related with memorizing facts, figures, problem solving procedures and
presenting in verbal or written form. It has less weightage of thinking, analyzing, reproducing
or generating new ideas. 

After the invention of the computer and internet, Google has taken responsibility for
memorizing knowledge human beings constructed and documented. Human brain has a
limitation of memorizing all the knowledge constructed till now. Even all the books which
humans wrote till date have turned into micro-film and are preserved digitally in the servers
all over the world. If someone wants specific information, they can easily Google it or access
it from any of the online libraries.

Now the question comes, what is the function of the school system which has been imparting
knowledge from the book, administering tests and asking questions from the textbooks. In
traditional approach students memorize facts for the examination and forget it the next day.
The school system has more important tasks to accomplish. Teachers need to have a
paradigm shift in education giving less importance to memorizing facts. To bring change in
the education system teachers need to avoid Traditional Tasks and implement Investigative
Learning Processes. 

Now I am going to talk about two types of tasks teachers can design.

1. Performance Task

2. Authentic Task

Performance task is related with the real task, where students assume that they are
accomplishing a task. If a school provides first aid training to the students managing required
equipment. They do demo acts such as bandaging, fixing splinters, uscaltations, giving
artificial breathing, shifting patients safely etc. Whereas, an authentic task is to go to a real
field and give first aid. When students get training they get lots of skills related to first aid.
When they have to perform in the real field they encounter lots of challenges. They may not
get enough equipment, piece of clothes, enough human support to transfer patients safely and
may forget the steps as well. After accomplishing the task one can review what went ok and
what went wrong. When they give first aid for the second time, there will be some improvement.
Hence authentic tasks provide opportunity to learn the skill or create something in real life
setting and learning happens for the long term.  

Another example of a performance task is to prepare a brochure for a school as homework.
Preparing a real brochure of a school with collaboration with the students is an Authentic Task.
In this process students get involved in planning, preparing the skeleton with main points to be
included, preparing dummy, writing content, editing content, taking photographs, designing
content with pictures. 

One more example of an Authentic Task is designing a school kitchen garden and installing
plastics shades. Further on, they do planning, decide on what vegetables to be planted,  do
task division and do the real work like digging, hoeing, sowing, watering, weeding, record
keeping, do lessons related to the curriculum, recording, harvesting, selling, keeping account
and reviewing. They gain a lot of first hand experience of growing vegetables, team work,
communication, collaboration, observation and recording, marketing and analyzing. In the long
run it will be helpful for them to take initiative to start a project.   

  

Hence to meet the new challenges of the 21st century, the school system needs to administer
and implement an investigative learning process so that children get enough opportunity to
think, make and improve. Assigning Performance Task and Authentic Tasks to students can
bring paradigm shift in education.