Coaching Letter #213

April 28, 2025

On the acute and critical need for urgent attention to Task

This Coaching Letter is about Task, because instruction across the board would be better if we could make improvements to several aspects of Task. I’ve been learning a lot about this recently. When we put together the Accelerating Learning Framework during the first months of the Pandemic (5 years ago now!), Task was one of the key elements. Then when we started our first NIC, the problem of practice that the member districts chose had to do with ensuring that all students had access to challenging tasks—I remember very clearly my colleague David turning to me and saying, “Looks like we need to get good at Task”, or something like that, and my thinking, Great, how do I do that? (And here I would like to record my gratitude to the folks who responded to my plea for suggestions of what to read, especially Amity and Gina, because they literally changed my life.)

The more I learned, the clearer it became that Task is a woefully underestimated factor in ensuring equitable and adaptive instruction. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I had underestimated Task as a factor in providing high quality instruction, but I don’t think I’m alone.) One of the reasons that we got so involved in Building Thinking Classrooms is because of what it says about Task—at the time it just seemed like smart advice, but now that I’ve read more of the research, I have a whole new appreciation for Peter’s approach. And now that we have a contract for a book on equitable and adaptive instruction, writing the chapters on Thinking and Task has meant an even deeper dive into the research, and it’s a bit mind-blowing.

Let me put it differently; when I first read the line “Task predicts performance” in Instructional Rounds, I thought it was a useful bit of wisdom. But now I have a fuller understanding of why Task predicts performance, what Task means, and what districts should be doing about it.

Just to be clear, I’m capitalizing Task here to indicate a particular meaning of the word—not as a thing, like an assignment or a worksheet, but as an abstraction, referring to the intellectual work that students do in order to learn. If we think of learning as the meaning-making that connects students’ existing knowledge (AKA schemata, funds of knowledge, background knowledge, prior knowledge) with new knowledge, then Task is the vehicle, or platform, for that meaning-making. As Walter Doyle (1988) puts it, tasks serve as “a context for students’ thinking during and after instruction”. He goes on to say, “the tasks students accomplish operate as the ‘proximal causes’ of their learning from teaching.” which is also really useful. Task is both the format and the mechanism for learning.

So here is some of what I’ve learned (and, to be clear, I’m enormously indebted to Tom, who has found for us most of the research on which the following points are based, and who consumes and synthesizes their lessons far quicker than I do, and who wrote about the research here). It’s a summary of what will be in the book—although, obviously, the language here is much more informal and unguarded, as you might expect from, you know, a Coaching Letter.

1. Task exists in the overlap of curriculum and instruction. You know what else is conceptualized as being in that overlap? Opportunity to learn. This is a construct that we seem to have moved away from, unfortunately. In its original conceptualization, opportunity to learn (OTL) was primarily understood as the extent to which students were exposed to the content they would later be assessed on. This framing, which emerged from international comparative studies in the 1960s, emphasized that OTL was largely a function of content coverage—whether students had the chance to learn the material that would be tested. For example, students in lower math tracks or in pull-out special education classes did not necessarily have the same opportunity to learn as their peers in other classes. As the concept evolved in subsequent decades, OTL began to incorporate not just what content was provided but also how it was delivered. This shift recognized that instruction matters—students might be exposed to the right content, but if instruction is weak, fragmented, or superficial, their opportunity to learn that content is diminished. This means that Task is a critical component of equity. It also means that, in the effort to ensure that ALL students have access to OTL, we have to attend to both curriculum and instruction.
2. High quality tasks are hard to create and take a lot of time.
3. One of the features of Task that matters most is the cognitive demand—the intellectual work that students must do to engage in learning. One of the many possible ways in which low expectations for students are operationalized is by lowering the cognitive demand of the task. For more detail on this you must read Tom’s latest post, Core of the Matter #9 (and subscribe while you’re at it). And the research suggests that even tasks that were cognitively demanding in the first place are frequently made less challenging by the way that teachers a) frame them, i.e. they do too much explaining, thereby reducing the amount of thinking that the students have to do, or b) scaffold, e.g. whether they provide just-in-case v. just-in-time scaffolds, or c) answer student questions, e.g. by doing too much telling in the answer, or d) rescue students as soon as they look like they might be struggling, rather than giving them time to think or by giving them small hints or questions rather than giving the game away. As Tom wrote in his piece, the research suggests that very few tasks maintain their cognitive demand over the course of a lesson, and most of the loss of cognitive demand happens in the initial teacher framing.

I just want to pause here and tell a story about what Tom and I saw in a high school Algebra 2 classroom last week. The students were working on a problem in which 2 people were painting a shed and they were told that one person could do it in 6 hours and the other in 4. They had to figure out how long it would take if both people painted it together. The students in one group were having a hard time getting started so the teacher came over. One of the boys asked, “Can we use a rational expression to solve this?” To which the teacher replied, “Yes, and here’s how you would set it up….” And she proceeded to tell them exactly what to do. From here the boys just plugged in the numbers from the problem and got the answer. Once you know to look for this trap being sprung you see it all the time. And the research suggests that you are more likely to see it in classrooms where teachers have lower expectations, and lower expectations disproportionately target students of color, students from low-income homes, and students who receive special education services.

4. The conflation of Task with assignments to be completed isn’t doing us any favors. In several of the videos of instruction we use in our workshops, you can see teachers lower the cognitive demand of the task, and one of the reasons for this is clearly that they just want students to complete the task. So when students aren’t on pace, or when (we infer) teachers are worried that students won’t complete the task without help, teachers often just step in and tell kids what to do. The mental model we should have of Task is that it’s the thinking, not the product, that matters, but I don’t think that’s universal or even typical.
5. My hunch is that the (real or perceived) need to attach grades to assignments compounds the issue of the emphasis on task completion.

If you want access to all the research articles that this summary is based on, email me.

Given all this, I feel more strongly about the role of the District in ensuring equitable and adaptive instruction than I have ever done, and that attention to Task, or OTL—in many ways they amount to the same thing—is a high leverage focus for instructional leadership. Here are some of the tasks related to Task that I think are most efficiently and effectively orchestrated at the district level. I understand that much or maybe most of this may present a significant challenge to under-resourced central offices all over the country. And maybe also a challenge to the mental model of what central offices should be focused on.

1. To the greatest extent possible, the district’s written curriculum should include tasks. As I pointed out above, task selection and creation are time-consuming and difficult; there’s no good reason why every teacher should be doing that for themselves, and there is much greater leverage in investing teacher time and effort into getting better at the instructional side of Task. The teacher isn’t the only one who can design and select the tasks for a particular learning target, but the teacher is the only one who can teach it. Even if the curriculum does not include tasks, every effort should be made so that task selection and creation are not left up to the individual teacher. Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but there is no benefit to having teachers do this for themselves, while instruction is entirely dependent on the teacher. So the district might attend to who is orchestrating task selection—coaches, teacher leaders, department heads—but also rooting out low-level assignments, which I suspect is just as important. I know of a couple of districts that have become much more assertive on that front lately—more power to them. Task selection is part of the instructional system that districts should create and coordinate.
2. The shared understanding of what good instruction looks like needs to challenge the mental model that the job of the teacher is to be indiscriminately helpful. I know I’m always prattling on about how great HQI Live! is (here is CL #85, one of many that I have written about HQI Live!), but one of the things I know from my years of participation in this amazing professional learning model is that teachers, for all the right reasons, frequently start from the position of questioning that the demo teaching they observe is good teaching because the demo teachers do not step in early, often, or sometimes at all when students are struggling. I know that the term “productive struggle” has become contentious lately. But there’s a big gap between interceding too soon and allowing students to become frustrated, and teachers need good, consistent, research-based guidance on what adaptive instruction should look like.
3. Teachers need techniques for what to do when they would otherwise step in to help, and they need to rehearse these moves. We see these all the time: teachers ask a high level question but have no Plan B for when no one answers, so either answer the question themselves or ask more fact-based questions; students ask a questions and teachers answer them, when they should put the question back on the student, ask a different question, tell them to ask a peer, or just smile and walk away; teachers notice confusion/hesitation/disagreement, and step in to be helpful when they should have allowed the time for students to grapple with the problem. None of these instructional moves necessarily comes easy to teachers–they need recipes for what to do and they need to try them out and see how they work and learn to do them better.

We have, in other words—and I’m quite proud of this little bit of alliteration—a triple threat when it comes to maintaining the cognitive demand of the work that students do:

1. We have a provisions problem: the resources, in the form of curriculum, programs, unit plans, etc., do not always provide teachers with adequate tasks or guidance to use them effectively;
2. We have a paradigm problem: teachers think their job is to explain, answer questions, and resolve cognitive dissonance, when their job is actually to ensure that students are provided with tasks that ask them to make meaning and which cause them to have to work, without making them so frustrated that they give up, avoid, or cheat.
3. We have a practice problem: teachers are not given sufficient time or support to develop new instructional routines that they can use to maintain the cognitive demand of a task.

None of these things is easy to change, but the cost of not changing them is high. I can’t tell you the best place to start, but I just want to pass on the best piece of advice I heard at the Carnegie Summit a couple of weeks ago: Start before you are ready.

This is a really active line of work for us at the moment. If you want to know more about what we’ve been working on, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are on spring break next week, rest up! And finally, we are hosting a day for anyone working on instructional improvement at the high school level—this initially started as a coaching workshop, but it has morphed a bit since then, and educators with all kinds of roles are signed up. Last chance to register! The workshop is May 15 at Mercy-by-the-Sea in Madison, Connecticut. Let me know if I can do anything else for you. Best, Isobel

Isobel Stevenson, PhD PCC
860-576-9410
@IsobelTX
Author of The Coaching Letter
Author with Jennie Weiner of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders: Principles and Processes Routledge, 2021
Author with Sarah Woulfin & Kerry Lord of Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools Teachers College Press, 2023