My Students Are Actually Thinking About Learning Targets
One student’s appeal on a summative assessment made me happier than she could have imagined
I first read Ron Berger’s Leaders of Their Own Learning in 2018, and I’ve been sold on the power of learning targets ever since. I believe they’re an essential part of successful instruction, assessment, and student learning.
I post learning targets on my Google Docs. On Slides. On Classroom. On Seesaw. I try to refer to them often in my instruction. And I ask students to use our targets to assess their own learning.
But how much attention do students really give to learning targets? Do they actually mean anything or do they just amount to irrelevant teacher talk and background noise?
Sometimes, students DO pay attention to the learning targets
I was tremendously heartened to discover this week that sometimes … students are thinking about the learning targets. Thinking carefully, it turns out.
Granted, this student had some added motivation to do so. But I still loved it.
Here’s how it went down.
We were reviewing a summative assessment in Math class. On the quiz, I had asked students to demonstrate their ability to divide fractions by whole…
