Once, I was confident about the value of sharing learning objectives with students.  Last year, I changed my mind.  While redrafting Responsive Teaching, I rewrote the chapter answering ‘How can we show students what success looks like?’ from scratch.  I’m no longer convinced that emphasising learning objectives helps; I still believe that sharing goals is important, but I think there are better ways to do it.  This post explains why I changed my mind and why sharing learning objectives is problematic; the next suggests a better approach.

What I used to do

In the first draft of Responsive Teaching, I advocated what I’d always believed: students should know the lesson’s goals; we can accomplish this by engaging them with the objectives.  Once, I had had students guess missing words in the objectives.  In 2013, I spent a term experimenting and wrote three posts summarising my conclusions: I explained why sharing objectives matters, examined alternative approaches, and described trying to share objectives better.  I developed a sheet (below) which asked students to respond to each objective.  This helped students recall and explain the objectives better: I was satisfied.

Best practice, c.2013.

Why is this approach problematic?

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’….

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. ‘They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with…”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Daisy Christodoulou kindly persuaded me that my emphasis on concrete descriptors of success was wrong.  Concrete descriptors are problematic because they use words, and, as Lewis Carroll emphasises, words are slippery.  “Do your best”, I tell my student.  “I did my best”, they announce later; I disagree.  A word means just what you choose it to mean… adjectives you can do anything with.  We have a problem therefore: student and teacher do not have a shared sense of the meaning of some words.

We try to make abstract ideas clearer by offering concrete success criteria.  “Do your best”, I tell my student, “that is, stay focused on the task throughout the lesson.”  This helps: I have specified what I want them to do; we are nearer a shared understanding of ‘best’.  But it’s limiting: ‘stay focused’ may be my student’s next step, but it’s probably not their ‘best’.  Doing their ‘best’ means more than staying focused, and it will mean something different in another lesson or with a new challenge.  Codifying success using concrete success criteria risks causing “frustration because of their inflexibility (Sadler, 1989, p.134)”: students’ work may meet the criteria (they may stay focused) but still fail to reach the desired standard (not be that great).  My concrete descriptor – ‘stay focused’ – clarified ‘best’, but did not help students do their ‘best’.

The same limitation applies to any concrete descriptor of success we offer.  Concrete descriptors, like ‘Include quotations,’ ‘Label the axes,’ and ‘Use your arms for balance’ can help students follow procedures.  But they cannot convey the quality of what is to be achieved: we cannot expect a novice to know what we mean when we ask them to ‘Support your argument’, ‘Write elegantly’ or ‘Think critically’.  Such criteria do not reflect underlying, implicit strengths of student work (Hammond, 2014); they cannot articulate the tacit (Rust, Price and O’Donovan, 2003).  As we realise our words are failing to convey our meaning, we grasp desperately for more words: “Supporting your argument means selecting telling evidence which reinforces your key points…”  But this only helps if students know what makes evidence ‘telling’ or how to ‘reinforce’ a ‘key point’.  Dylan Wiliam quotes a student who was asked to be ‘more methodical’ responding: “If I knew how to be methodical, I would have done it.”

Conclusion

My original approach ensured students knew the objectives – in words – but did not help them recognise or achieve the desired standards.  As I realised their limitations, I renounced concrete descriptors, turned my back on success criteria, cried death to rubrics.  But what could replace them?  We still want students to know what success looks like:

“The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point. In other words, students have to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing and be able to regulate what they are doing during the doing of it (Sadler, 1989, p.121).”

This is impossible unless students know what success looks like.  If learning objectives and success criteria offer limited help, what can we do?  Rewriting Responsive Teaching, I recognised the power of an alternative: my next post describes it.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice.

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Daisy Christodoulou’s discussion of the problems of performance descriptors here, and conveying tacit knowledge here.

References

Hammond, K. (2014). The knowledge that ‘flavours’ a claim: towards building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales. Teaching History 157.

Rust, C., Price, M, & O’Donovan, B. (2003). Improving students’ learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 28, pp.147-164.

Sadler, D. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18(2), pp.119-144.