Blog #17

Establish clear learning objectives and communicate them to students in a way that is understandable and meaningful.  Clearly communicating the objectives or learning targets to your students is important.  We know this because we have all either received, or know a teacher who has received, the dreaded comment from an observation about not having the objectives for the lesson written on the board.  🤪  So if it is such a crucial part of our observations, it HAS to be a critical part of the education we provide, right?  But is that enough?  Is simply having them posted somewhere for the lesson really the magic bullet that administrators make it seem?  In this week’s blog, I share my thoughts on this.  I must admit, my thinking has been evolving, especially in the past two years as I have embarked on the journey of transitioning to standards based learning/ grading/ reporting.  And full disclosure, what I am about to share is my goal for my classes.  I am not fully there yet, but this is the direction that I am moving and I believe it will be beneficial to my students in the long run.  Be aware, I am writing from a standards based learning perspective, but even if your school has not made that transition, I think you can still get some applicable ideas for your classes.

Learning Targets for the Chapter/Unit

In Blog #12, I gave this example of a proficiency scale from Chris Hunter’s website.

A proficiency scale is a tool that takes a single standard from your course curriculum and breaks it down into levels of understanding/ skill.  In this example, the proficiency scale uses “Emerging”, “Developing”, “Proficient” and “Extending” as the categories.  Other proficiency scales may use labels like “Below”, “Approaching”, “Meeting” or “Exceeding” to differentiate a student’s level in comparison to the expectations for the standard.  In a chapter or unit, you will likely cover several standards, each with its own proficiency scale.  When you group the proficiency scales for the included standards into a single document, you have a rubric.

Ideally, at the beginning of each chapter or unit, the teacher provides the students with the rubric for the standards that will be assessed at the end of that chapter.  The rubric specifically communicates to students, right up front, what the learning targets for the chapter will be…no surprises, not “gotcha” questions.  Moreover, because of the leveling in the proficiency scale for each standard, students can determine where they currently are in their understanding and the learning they will need to do to meet the standard when assessed.  By using descriptors and examples, students don’t need to interpret the mathematical language of the standard to understand what is expected.  They can more easily chart their progress through the chapter using formative feedback and self-assessment to gauge their preparedness for the exam.

Learning Targets for the Lesson

For each lesson, the teacher can communicate and focus on the specific skill and understanding from the rubric that students will attempt to master in that lesson.  In most cases, a lesson will focus on some aspect of a single standard, and the teacher can share the proficient/ meeting level of that standard as the learning target.  This is where “posting the objective on the board” could be helpful.  But I would recommend going beyond that.  If you use handouts for notetaking or practice, also include the learning targets or the entire proficiency scale on that document.  As you teach specific skills and processes, refer back to the learning targets or proficiency scale to help students make the connections between what they are doing and what will be expected on the assessment.  When providing practice examples for students to reinforce their learning, attempt to show them an approaching problem, a meeting problem, and occasionally, when appropriate, an exceeding problem.  This allows students to see the difference among the levels of the problems and determine where they currently sit on the proficiency scale.  If you are teaching an AP course, give students a multiple choice example and a free response example so that they can see how the skill will be assessed in different ways.  You may even want to consider organizing your practice homework in a way that helps students identify what level they are able to consistently do accurately and what skills they still need to work on.  A key aspect to approaching your lessons in this way is to always tie the discussion in the lesson back to the overall chapter rubric so students can see how they are working toward expectations and preparing for the exam.

Learning Targets for the Assessment

Once you have presented students with a rubric that clearly defines the standards and expectations for the chapter, and have demonstrated how the skills of each lesson fit within the overall rubric, the last step is to apply that same transparency to the assessment.  When creating assessments for your class, you should have a clear understanding of how each question ties back to the standards in the rubric. So why not communicate that to the students?  You can organize the questions for your exam into sections based on the standard that they assess.  Or, if you have an identification system (like numbers or letters) for your standards, you could label each problem with the standard(s) that are being assessed.  Some may think that this gives students too much of a “hint” for the problem.  I don’t think that is true.  Instead, I think it gives students a way to organize their thoughts and apply the skills learned with regard to a particular standard while working toward a solution to the problem.  If you want to go a step further, you could even organize problems so that students know which are approaching, meeting or exceeding.  This could help students make choices about which problems they should focus their efforts on, and which problems they can maybe skip if they are struggling or running out of time.

Whether your school is a standards based or a traditional school, we all have standards/ objectives/ learning targets that we are trying to help our students meet.  By following the suggestions above, we help students learn to prioritize their learning, and we help ourselves to stay focused on what is essential.  Communicating at this level will not happen overnight, but the more we move in this direction, the more we help our students meet expectations and find success in our classes.