Centering Curriculum Conversations Around Learning Targets

Carrie Sand contributed today's post. Her other recent posts about planning professional learning can be found here.

I love the fact that my principal loves professional resources as much as I do. I love the fact that my principal orders professional resources and then puts them in my mailbox with a note that says “Add this to your shelves when you’re done.” I love that one of his favorite resources is the magazine “Educational Leadership” from ASCD. And what does my principal love from all of this.….he loves the fact that every time I find a wonderful idea to implement from my freebie, he technically gets the ‘shout-out’ for the great find!! It really is a small price to pay for a free subscription to a great resource and, in the end, we’ve both agreed that it’s a win-win.

NOTE: Wisconsin educators can access the article Carrie mentions in this post completely free using BadgerLink.

So it was in the October 2014 issue where I found the article titled “Learning Targets on Parade” by Susan M. Brookhart and Connie M. Moss that got me thinking more about my work as a coach and the many hours a coach puts into fostering, supporting, implementing, writing, leading, revising, vetting (and many other “-ings”) curriculum. I like working with curriculum and I think most coaches would agree that they value the importance of building a strong universal instructional system; and, when you work with really great teams, the conversations about rigor and expectations and scope and sequence really feel like a true work of collaboration. My problem is that these deeply collaborative discussions about curriculum are too few and far between. In fact, much too often, the curriculum meetings I am part of become groups of people working next to one another on independent tasks: one person finding a great website, one an electronic tool or graphic organizer, another creating a google doc or form. The rich collaborative discussions that really drive great curriculum are missing.

As a coach, I began to wonder how I could hone in on a specific focus point to help spark these discussions. As I read further into the article, I realized that learning targets were the place to go to accomplish this goal.  As outlined in the article by Brookhart and Moss, learning targets should go beyond rewording the language of the standards into the basic “I can…” statement many teachers have implemented in their classrooms. Instead, learning targets need to tell the students “exactly what they’re suppose to learn and what their work will look like when they learn it.” As I read more in the article, I learned that the authors claim that in order to write a good learning target (or objective statement)  a teacher must: write the learning, not the activity as the learning target; write a new learning target each day so students get the sense of how lessons build on one another; and embody the learning target within the performance task of the day so the activity feels meaningful, important, and essential to the learning.

With learning targets more clearly defined and having a specific protocol for writing them, I continued on into my October issue of EL. Next, I encountered the article “The Quest for Mastery: What practices do high-performing urban schools have in common?” by Joseph F. Johnson Jr, Cynthia L. Uline, and Lynne G. Perez. Now, my small, rural Wisconsin school might be the exact opposite of the definition of “urban,” but if an author sticks the words “high performing” in their title, you can bet that I’m reading on! It was here again that I read about the practice of creating objective-driven lessons, and how teachers can use learning targets, or objective statements, as conversation focal points in team meetings to plan curriculum that focuses on a depth of understanding, and ultimately mastery, of content and standards. As outlined in the article, teachers benefit from conversations with colleagues centered around writing strong objectives, as well as purposeful planning for academic vocabulary, avoiding and pointing out common misconceptions, and connecting the knowledge to prior learning.

In the past few months, I have worked to refocus curriculum meetings based on these considerations. I have followed an informal protocol that involves beginning curriculum work by initiating discussions centered around writing strong objective statements, and then considering the vocabulary, misconceptions, and connection to prior learning each lesson entails. As a result, our curriculum work has sparked conversations that are deep and meaningful. These conversations have also moved beyond curriculum meetings to team meetings and PLC time. When teachers take ownership and implement the process on their own, I know my work as a coach has been successful.