Learning Goals & Success Criteria

This is the 'why' and 'how high' of learning with a 'power-up' to check for effectiveness

This is a small shift in teaching for great gains in empowering your students to understand the purpose of the lesson and what being a successful learner will look like in the lesson. Do you want your student to know:


Here is a simple routine that you can use every lesson to bring focus and empowerment to your students. Write on your whiteboard a brief description of what your Learning Intention is for the lesson. What is the core purpose of your lesson? What are you trying to achieve? What are you hoping your students will learn? Write this in language that students can understand. Sometimes this is easy to write, sometimes you need to think carefully to clarify your purpose. Do you have an outcome you are focusing on, is it a planning lesson, or is it refining aspects of student work through practice? 

Under your Learning Intentions, write Success Criteria and list what a student needs to achieve during a lesson to be successful in that lesson. This is a translation of the learning intention into the student experience. A learning intention may have several success criteria that range from easier to challenging. Research shows that high expectations of students lead to higher student achievement. Without success criteria, it is like asking a student to do a high jump without a crossbeam, students tend to jump as high as the minimum that they can do and satisfy their teacher. Hattie refers to this as the 'minimax' principle.

Power up with an end of Lesson Reflection Activity (Optional)

An optional addition to this pedagogy shift that works well together is adding a student reflection routine at the end of the lesson to prompt students to evaluate their own learning and identify any unmet needs that still need to be addressed. Educational philosopher John Dewey states that an individual actually learns more from ‘thinking about his experiences’ rather than from the ‘actual experiences’ themselves (UKEdChat Wiki). 

During the last few minutes of the lesson prompt students to think through a “Reflective Evaluation”. This prompts students to develop meta-cognitive habits of reflecting on their learning to become self-regulated learners. Examples include: “how did you go with the Learning Goal & Success Criteria”, “tell me about what you learnt today”, “how did you learn that”, “did today’s lesson raise any questions for you”, “what do you need to still work on from todays lesson”, “how could you apply this learning in the real world or in another subject”, “I Used to Think... Now I Think...”, and if you have a little more time, try 3-2-1, ask students to write down:

a. 3 ideas or learnings from what was presented

b. 2 examples of uses for how the ideas could be implemented

c. 1 unresolved area / muddiest point  

 

Project Zero is a great source for alternative routines that support making learning visible and helping in evaluating student experiences (http://www.pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines ).

These processes also shift your lesson from teacher-focused towards a more student-focused approach. This is achieved through greater emphasis on what the student is working towards and reflective thinking routines that check for learning and inform future lesson planning.

Be realistic in how you implement this slight shift to your practice, try it once a day to begin, reflect upon how it worked for you, ask your students about their experience, be aware you are likely to have successes and failures in this and that’s okay. You may want to learn more and experiment with how you utilise this process. You may also want to debrief with a colleague about your successes and failures.

What does this look like in action?

Watch a 3min video that discusses Learning Intentions and Sucess Criteria from “VISIBLE LEARNING for Literacy, Grades K-12” by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and John Hattie: http://players.brightcove.net/268012963001/rJenILPQx_default/index.html?videoId=4798863690001

Are you interested in learning more about Visible Learning and John Hattie?

Smith’s Hill High School Library has the following books: