Shifting to Learning Goals

In the last week, there have been a couple of emails about helping students set goals, but how often have you been irritated by a student goal that sounds like this, "My goal is to get an A in the class."?  Is that the goal we want for our students, a grade?  Answer:  NO, unless the grade is 100% reflective of the learning.  To be 100% of the learning, then we'd have to fix all 15 of Ken O'Connor's suggestions in our book study, and let's face it...we aren't ready to do that...yet.

Instead, we need to get students focused on setting goals related to learning, but in order for that to happen, we must:

1)  Set clear learning targets.
2)  Engage students with those targets so they can understand and set their own goals.
3)  Build lessons that engage students to learn autonomously so that they feel a sense of control over their learning.

Here are great examples of these 3 steps....

Given their writing rubric, students reflect upon their writing progress, identifying skills they have mastered and skills they need to improve.

Once students have reflected on their work, they are given options for personalized writing goals.  The samples directly correlate to their rubric to ensure alignment to learning targets and student ownership of learning.

Students writing DBQs work with partners to get feedback on their DBQ learning targets that are directly aligned to the rubric.



Students set the goal to eliminate bullying by targeting specific audiences.  They then begin to research and create presentations that can be given to various groups of students.

When we consistently accomplish these, we've built a learning culture where students will never ask, "Do I have to do this?"