Every single year I have taught and it’s been 20 years now, learning targets have been a hot topic. Whether you call them Standards of Learning, learning targets, objectives, Common Core Standards - they are all the same. They are a list of things that adults choose and prioritize in importance for students to learn.
What do you want your students to know and do?
In my experience, have a clear, well-written objective for students to learn does in fact make for good instructional design and assessment. In other words, activities can be structured to engage students in learning and an assessment can be made to determine if the student really mastered the content.
Okay - that’s good news. But something has been nagging me and it has to do with the choice of targets. If a different group of people were chosen to determine what is important for students to learn and know how to do - wouldn’t we have different targets?
And who’s to say who is right?
*Side note - as I’m thinking this, I do think this may apply more to students in grades 3 and above. There is a difference in learning to read and reading to learn as applied across all the content areas.
Second, I have wondered if having common targets actually cap our potential as an education institution of learning. I started to think about the idea of targeted learning. What if students had more choice in their learning targets and teachers facilitated and provided support throughout the process. In the end, the student would actually have to show that they met their target.
Recently, I have been wondering about a different frame of thinking. What if we asked the student to choose something that they want to do and then document all the learning that took place along the way? Can’t we call these learning targets? In other words, do we have to start we the target or can they be developed along the way?
To come back to my original statement, a lot of time is spent on identifying, writing and rewriting standards. Why?
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