Coles Notes: Learning Goals and Success Criteria

The Ministry of Education is doing a big push for educators to focus their teaching to learning goals and creating success criteria with their students. I read “Learning Goals and Success Criteria: Viewing Guide” and watched a video on the same topic. To know more or do your own research, please click on the above links.

Our goal as educators is to help students become independent, self-monitoring learners and this helps us accomplish just that. We make sure the students have a clear understanding of what they are learning, and they know exactly how to be successful in their learning.

Here is the framework:

Learning Goals:

Learning goals focuses on the curriculum expectations; identifying and sharing with your students at the beginning of the learning what they will be expected to know. You can do this by focusing on one curriculum expectation and getting the students to determine what it actually means and turn it into language that they can understand. As a class you can define, change, or delete words so that it makes sense to them. We can share these learning goals orally, visually or in writing.

After you create the student created or students worded learning goals, you write them on the board that states “By the end of this class/unit/week I will —>Insert learning goal here <—.

Here is how to do it in your own classroom:

Success Criteria:

The students brainstorm in groups or as a class what they will need to do to be successful for the learning goal. The success criteria can also be known as look-fors and has to be explicit and transparent.

Success Criteria needs to be co-created by the teacher and the class. The steps for this are:

• Step 1: Brainstorm the criteria,ask: What does this look like when we do this well” or “How do we know when we have learned how to ______”)

• Step 2: Sort and catergorize the criteria,

• Step 3: Make a post a T-chart/checklist/template/rubric,

• Step 4: Add, revise, and refine.

In order for the students to really understand the criteria, they have to be able to interact with it, which helps them internalize the look-fors and how to apply them. If you have old student work, you could take off the names and give them to the students. Get them to assess how the student did according to the criteria. As teachers, we can help students develop a deeper understanding of each criteria by focusing on them one at a time. Some students may need to focus on limited criteria.

A great way to see how the students are doing with the learning goal and/or their personal goals is to ask them to self reflect as an exit ticket. Ask them: “How are you progressing on the learning goal? How do you know?” This way we can quickly see how they students are doing and what needs re-teaching or who needs extra help.

Here is an example of an exit ticket:

After creating a success criteria with your class, it is a natural next step to co-create a rubric.

Descriptive Feedback:

When the learning goals and success criteria are understood, the students can assess their own work and they then can provide descriptive feedback for themselves, to the teacher and to their peers.

Self and Peer Assessment:

You will need to explicitly teach your class about how to peer assess. Make sure that they focus on the positives first and then the next steps. This should sound like “Alex, you did follow the success criteria on  this and this but I would suggest for your next step to improve this. Each student should have a opportunity to peer assess and self assess on every task. A checklist would be really helpful for this.

Individual Goal Setting:

By clearly understanding the learning goals and success criteria, the students can set goals for themselves to improve their learning. This can guide their learning because they will know what they need to focus on.

In order to set appropriate goals, the goals need to be SMART goals that address the learning goal, success criteria and have next steps.

This framework focuses on 3 different questions:

1) Where am I going? 2) How am I going? and, 3) Where to next?

Where am I going focuses on the learning goals and the curriculum. How am I going is building the success criteria and the students using it to determine how they are doing and where to next is the students self assessing themselves to know what they need to focus on next.