Establishing Success Criteria

I have not written a blog post since last September’s letter to my students.  I have a lot of reasons/explanations (excuses) but that is probably a whole other blog post.  I say this only to point out how inspired I was by the video from @bigpicturelearning by @tiomikel tweeted by @EagleRockSchool.  Most striking to me was that a four minute ten second video watched casually during lunch made me go get a piece of paper to take notes.  The notes were not enough so I wrote this blog post to serve as a way to clarify my thinking, save for later and share with my Alternative Education Program Department colleagues.  We met with our new principal last week to share our work and goals for next year.  Identifying  and collecting data on learning targets, goals, skills etc. was one of those goals.  This video so succinctly summarized what I could not articulate it garnered notes and response.

I was especially struck with the clarity of organization.  This is something a lot of teachers probably do but to have it articulated, especially when it is going to be implemented in a team (4 core subject teachers with common students) is very helpful.

The process starts with identifying learning targets in knowledge, skills and reasoning.  There are then performances during the learning to demonstrate the targets are met measured by criteria that can be simple like “look fors” or more complex like a rubric.  Its crucial teachers have ways of communicating these learning targets, performances and criteria for success to students.  I especially like the idea of having students rewrite the targets in their own words and using “I can” statements so that they are well informed about the learning targets.

http://teachingpartners.com/weeklywall/week17/#strategy

The best part of this amazing video is that @tiomikel will be talking about #successcriteria tonight, July 14th, on the #TPOfficeHour at 6 PDT/8 CDT/9 EDT. Hoping to hear a lot of feedback about these ideas and how to implement.