Zak's Weekly Musings (September 20, 2023)

In 2016, I returned to Johannesburg after a visit to The Nueva School in the Bay Area as the AISJ representative for the Collaborative for Innovative Education (CIE). This was a cohort of six schools across five continents, all of which were committed to determining the best practices in personalized learning. These practices were considered best irrespective of the student demographic, cultural background, and learning profiles. The goal was to create a comprehensive suite or menu of techniques and strategies.

Upon my return, I was eager to share and implement what I had observed and absorbed during the trip. However, theory and practice are not always easily aligned.  

When I began to incorporate mastery-based progressions into my classroom, along with a curriculum further shaped by student interests, I faced two major hurdles: 

Firstly, I struggled to monitor and track each student’s whereabouts in the curriculum; Secondly, while I knew just how pivotal learning targets are, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to create learning targets that were responsive to the fact that each of my students was in a different place in the curriculum.

Of course, I didn’t want to abandon learning targets. Research has consistently highlighted the importance of learning targets for students. For instance, a study by Hattie (2009) found that clear learning intentions and success criteria are among the most impactful teaching strategies, with an effect size significantly higher than many other educational interventions. This emphasis on clarity and purpose is reinforced by Marzano (2007), who argued that setting objectives or learning targets can lead to increased student achievement.

So, what did I do? 

Well, I began to anchor learning targets to individual standards, topics, and/or activities, as opposed to lessons. In other words, when students came into my classroom, there was no longer a shared learning target on the board. Rather, the learning targets were written and shared at the top of each of the documents in my class’ OneNote folder. Each document contained a specific module, and each module had its own learning target. 

Here is an example of what this looked like (you’ll notice I started referring to learning targets as success criteria, but it’s the same concept). 

This change in approach allowed me to set the directional vector for each student’s classroom experience, and also it allowed me to unburden myself of trying to control for 18 different learning targets.

The call to action from today’s Musing is simple: 1) Everyone needs to set clear learning targets, if you’re not already doing this; 2) Learning targets should be set according to the standard, topic, or activity, rather than the lesson as a whole. 

Next week, we’ll talk about how to write an effective learning target.