Authentic Task and Audience - Problem Solving Session

We often hear about the value of using authentic tasks in the classroom. They can motivate learners, provide an opportunity to integrate skills, and help us focus on the big issues of a course. When developing courses and trying to create authentic tasks, we need to understand what they are in a little more detail. We wanted to differentiate between authentic tasks and other ways of applying skills and knowledge, so we opened up the conversation and got other instructors’ input.

We came into this session asking the following questions. For any subject:

• What are some ideas of authentic tasks?
• What are your sources or contacts when creating authentic tasks?
• What tips can you give us from your experience? Any pitfalls to avoid? Any amazing successes?

After describing various examples of authentic tasks that we have been involved with, we tried to define what makes a task authentic and came up with this list of characteristics:

• Has value outside of educational setting (may be workplace or general life)
• Utility beyond the project
• Can be simulated, real, or a hybrid
• Can be simple or complex
• May involve authentic props/documents
• It considers: what will be meaningful to students?
• Includes an element of performance/execution of a skill
• An authentic audience – is someone who would actually use this product or process outside of the educational setting? Community, industry, general public, peers
• Assessment of authentic tasks can be based on process or product, depending on the learning outcome

Other considerations that came out of the discussion include:

• Community partnerships can contribute to authentic task creation. Establishing and maintaining these can be challenging.
• Timing and the timeline of such a task needs to be carefully planned for
• Flexibility needs to be built into such tasks
• Reflection time should be built in early and often
• Instructors will need different types of support for some of the bigger ideas discussed

This has given us a great starting point for integrating authentic tasks into these new courses. We appreciate the people who showed up and offered insights and asked thoughtful questions. We look forward to learning with you in the next session.

Not everyone can make it to the scheduled sessions. We appreciate your emails and conversations around these topics anytime. Some of the resources shared with us this way include:

• Creating Learning Partners Literacy Tutor Training manual,Unit 13
• Creating authentic materials and activities for the adult literacy classroom: A handbook for practitioners

We are holding these open problem solving sessions every two weeks as part of the development of the Career Program Pathway – Creative Technologies project. The purpose of these sessions is twofold: give SFL and CT faculty multiple opportunities to get involved in the development process, and for the course developers to be able to learn from the expertise of others and apply that knowledge in this project.