Session 3, Part 3: Two Approaches for Authentic Performance Tasks

Create Your Ideal Curriculum, Session 3: Design an Authentic Assessment Process

The messiness that comes with performance tasks is a reason why more teachers do not implement them in their curriculum. Yet this messiness also has two upsides: space to be creative with how students can show what they know, and the opportunity to implement structures that students need for their creativity to thrive.

Two approaches for developing authentic performance tasks that seem to support this work well are place-based learning and project-based learning. Each has their specific benefits as well as a few drawbacks. Both are grounded in inquiry, defined by Kathy Short as “a collaborative process of connecting to and reaching beyond current understandings to explore tensions significant to the learner” (2009). These tensions might be a larger conflict in the world, such as systemic racism. A tension could also be present in their immediate community, for example the use of plastic straws in the cafeteria. What the performance tasks does is frame these challenges within an authent…