Years and years ago, I learned about creating authentic performance tasks for my students. As I learned more about them, I was like, Wow! These are fun to create and came to find out, my students LOVED completing them. Creating authentic performance tasks allow teachers to be creative and students a chance to stretch their little brains. You may be thinking, Oh, I know what a performance task is….well, an authentic performance task is a little different. Many people think a performance task is when a student makes something, say, you ask a student to create a graph based on a survey. Well, yes, that is a performance task. But it is missing important components of an authentic performance task….well, what is that you ask?
GRASPS
Example Please!
Different Outcomes
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This student chose to be a fashion
designer. She not only included articles of clothing but also accessories. |
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This student chose to be a fashion designer
and created outfits for the First Family and included their pet dog. She measured pieces of the outfits in inches and centimeters. |
I hope that you will give authentic performance tasks a try. The hardest part is getting started, but now I find ourselves driving home thinking of the new task for my students….and I know they love them, too, because anytime I tell them they have a new task, they try to guess what they will do next! Please feel free to contact me at hleblanc@2brainyapples.com if you need a little help getting started! If you want to check out some of the performance tasks I have in my TpT shop, click here!
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Hi, this is a terrific post! I work with Special Education 1st grade and I'm a HUGE believer in performance tasks/assessments. I haven't heard of GRASP though…I really want to make a push for that real-world connection. Thanks for the great ideas! Jen
You are so welcome! When I learned GRASPS, it became so much easier to create real world tasks 🙂