Taskmaster Education takes elements of the Channel 4 television show Taskmaster and uses ‘them to inspire, engage and teach children and young people. Taskmaster Education enables those young people to develop a variety of skills such as problem solving, lateral thinking, oracy, team work, creativity and resilience, through educational and engaging task based learning.
In this session, I was actually asked to participate with my colleague against other teams. We were set 4 tasks: a prize task, a warm up task, main task and timed task. The warm up task involved us, as a team, to think of the something obscure that someone could eat. The answers from the teams included: dog biscuits, broccoli stalks and cactus on pizza. In this task we had to persuade our audience why this was the most obscure thing someone could. This involved us developing our skills in creativity, oracy and lateral thinking.
There were a series of other tasks that we also had to participate in as part of the sessions demonstration. This session was both interactive and engaging.
However, this got me considering how we could develop this within our own school for students and staff. For students, we are considering KS3 drop down days with Taskmaster sessions delivered by the teaching and learning practitioners in order to help students foster the skills that are provided through Taskmaster Education.
In terms of staff, we are going to try and develop the concept of Taskmaster to improve teaching and learning. The logistics of this have not completely been ironed out, although watch this space!
Pedagogy in Practice 