Helping students to know where they are going — using learning targets
Do your students know the learning intentions behind the tasks they undertake? We know, as adult learners, that learning something just for the sake of it isn’t terribly appealing. Knowing why one is learning something and where it fits in the overall scheme of things, helps one want to learn it. Are you the same? Many/most of our students are too. They are much more focused when they are learning with a goal in mind.
Recently, we were in a school that is putting processes in place to make the curriculum outcomes clear to students. No longer happy to say, ‘Cos its good for you!’ or ‘You’ll need it later in school/life’, teachers are thinking about the real life importance of learning and sharing it with students. Learners as young as Reception were able to say what their literacy and numeracy learning targets are and how they are working to achieve them.
How could you do this?
- Unpack the key outcomes
The teaching teams had a serious look at the curriculum and the outcomes expected. They wanted students to be able to answer the question What do I have to learn?
A clear vision of what students should know and be able to do is a great starting point for teaching with clarity and building learner motivation.
2. Start small — in most cases, in just one learning area.
Most teachers chose to focus on fluency (or automaticity) in number fact recall first.
Manageable, measurable, tangible and hugely important. Rapid recall of addition skills (number pairs, doubles, facts to 10) or times tables are great starting points.
Scaffolding the first experience and allowing students to select from some teacher created targets, meant that students could quickly experience success and would be excited about continuing.
3. Introduce the steps required to achieve goals/targets.
We cannot just assume that students will know what is required to achieve a learning outcome. There are a number of things teachers can do to make this process more explicit.
Clear steps should be introduced, for example:
- Set the goal, make it achievable.
- Plan how to practice the goal.
- Do it until you are confident.
- Collect evidence that you know it.
- Celebrate your achievement.
Students who have already successfully achieved a target are great coaches for students when they are first tackling a new target.
It won’t be long before you can introduce another target set to your class. At the school we observed, this was typically a list of the writing skills they expected their year group to manage.
4. Write Targets
It also wasn’t be long before the upper primary students begin to identify their own targets, across the curriculum.
At this stage, the teachers recognised the importance of teaching children the language of writing targets or goals.
5. Focus on individual’s progress
A critical focus is to minimise the competition against others. A focus on improving against one’s own performance seemed most effective.
Getting better at something takes hard work or grit, and should be benchmarked against one’s own achievement.
Perseverance or Growth Mindset are teaching foci that will support students to be more successful in target setting.
6. Revisit often
Come back to previous targets on a regular basis. Has the learning stuck? How can they ensure it does?
7. Celebrate wildly
Celebration is a topic for a future blog post — stay tuned!
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