Stage 2: Generate Possible Tasks Now to brainstorm. Use the notes you just jotted down as raw material to help you think of possibilities in response to these questions. Be creative... don't edit yourself yet (that's Stage 3). The point at this stage is to have as many ideas as possible to work with. Respond to the prompts in the left column by sketching ideas in the right column.

Could you ask your learners to recreate some important event in the form of a newpaper account or documentary or play? Could you ask learners to compile a database of important items? An address book of important people or places? A calendar of important events? A collection of stories, jokes, how-to's, advice? If there was a compilation of data about individual people or events or institutions, could you ask your learners to make some generalizations about the data, or to look for patterns in it? Does anyone who works with this topic act like a detective? Could you recreate a mystery or puzzle that would let your students experience the puzzle-solving process? Is there some product your students could design? Some process or event they could plan? Could you ask your learners to make a decision, a choice among competing alternatives? A rating? Could your students take the information in this topic and move it into a completely different form, like a poem or a painting? A flowchart or org chart? Can you put students into the roles of people with contending beliefs or interests who have to come to some degree of consensus? Who? Could your students create a metaphor for some complex thing and explain it? Could your learners make something new by combining old things in new ways? Are there predictions your learners could make? Hypotheses and hunches they could test? Could you ask your students to walk in someone else's shoes by creating a fictional journal? Could you ask them to become someone else and portray them around a meeting table? Is there some form of communication (written, oral, multimedia) that is used by adults who work with this topic that you could ask your students to create? Are there individuals who should be interviewed by your students? Could your students be tasked with trying to change someone's opinion? Whose?

Recreate the news coverage of the launch of Pioneer or Voyager? Create a calendar of when each planet will appear in a given constellation? Create baseball cards depicting the planets and moons? Let students study pictures from probes and looking for common geological features on several planets/moons? Write a poem for each planet? A rap song? Rank the planets in terms of their beauty? Recreate the Is Pluto a Planet debate? Write a short short story about the first human visit to each planet. Create a compilation complete with chronology.

Stage 3: Incubate Every book ever written about creativity extols the virtue of incubation. Good ideas sometimes seem to come from nowhere if you work on a problem for awhile and then put it away for a day or two. Park these worksheets somewhere safe and let your unconscious play with things, and then come back and look it over again.

Stage 4: Make a Choice OK... you've deferred judgment long enough. Go back and remember the guiding question and topic you started with, the curricular goals you have, and the resources you're likely to have available. Given all that, return to Stage 2 and circle the task ideas that seem to have potential. Remember that you need at least one culminating task that ties the whole lesson together and exemplifies the thinking skills and content knowledge that you're after. In addition to that central, final task, there might be one or two interim tasks to be done before that to prepare students for the grand finale. Write a few sentences about the task(s) your students will do in the space below. Look back at the WebQuest Taskonomy to refine your thinking. Then go on to the student WebQuest template and begin to flesh out the task description.

I think I like the Pluto Debate idea best. I'll have some kids read one side of the issue, and the other kids take the opposing view. We'll stage a meeting of the Junior International Astronomical Union and have each side prepare their case. The goal of the meeting is to refine the definition of the Solar System. I'll bring in some parents to serve as judges. Should be fun!

© Bernie Dodge, 2001