I'm Not a Fan of Learning Goals

One of my many unpopular opinions

Here is a section of the Marzano Focused Teacher Evaluation Model, one of many popular frameworks for describing effective teaching.

From page 18 of this document

Whether you use the Marzano model or something else, this is common advice in schools. Post the learning goal. Reference the learning goal throughout the lesson. Make sure students can explain the learning goal.

I think this is unhelpful advice.

Working Memory

Memory is the residue of thought.¹ One of the core challenges of teaching is that the place where humans think, our working memory, has limited capacity. To maximize learning, teachers need to be deliberate with what students are thinking about. To use the language of cognitive load theory, extraneous load on working memory makes learning less likely.

My argument in this post is that all the hullaballoo about learning goals can end up being extraneous load on working memory. The idea that teachers should constantly reference learning goals and that students should, at any point in the lesson, be able to state the learning goal, is simply not reasonable given human cognitive architecture. Students cannot hold all of that information in their minds while also thinking hard about the stuff we want them to learn.

One qualifier here. I’m not saying that we should avoid telling students what we’re learning, or that we should march students into class and give them a series of tasks with no purpose or explanation. My argument is that the way we communicate those ideas with students should be conscious of the limits of working memory.

Circumference

Ok here’s example one. Let’s say I’m teaching students to find the circumference of a circle. I might start the lesson by saying, “Today we’re going to learn how to calculate something new as part of our work with circles.” I would avoid mentioning circumference. Students don’t know what that means yet. Then, the first thing I do in this lesson is to practice working with radius and diameter of circles. Draw a circle with a radius of 3 inches. If a circle has a radius of 10 inches, what is its diameter? Etc. I would tell students that we’re beginning with a review of radius and diameter because they’ll need to be able to convert between them later in the lesson. Here I am laser-focused on radius and diameter. I’m not introducing anything extra. I’m trying to make sure students are good to go with those ideas, checking for understanding and addressing any issues that come up.

Then I would introduce the idea of circumference with a bunch of examples and non-examples. Again, laser focus here: my goal is to help students understand what the word circumference means and why it can be useful. I’ll communicate that thinking about circumference is our main goal for the day, but I don’t want to get hung up on questions about how to find circumference yet. I’m not worried about whether a student can state the full learning objective for the lesson. I’m trying to make sure students understand the meaning of the word “circumference.”

Later in the lesson I’ll show students how to find circumference and we’ll practice a bit. This is hard! Students need to remember pi, they need to convert from radius to diameter if necessary, they’re using a calculator, they need to remember to write the units. Students are often focused on the calculation and lose track of the bigger picture. That’s totally normal. If you walk into my lesson and ask students what they’re learning, they might say they aren’t sure. That’s a reality of the human mind: students’ working memory is busy with the calculations, and they’ve lost the bigger picture.

To some teachers this is mindless calculation or memorization. I disagree. Part of learning circumference is a bit of practice to get the basic muscle memory for the calculation. We should expect that students will lose the forest for the trees, focusing on the calculation rather than what it represents. Once they gain a bit of confidence with the calculation, it’s my job to help everyone step back, think about what that calculation means, and connect it to everything we were doing earlier in the lesson. This is the part where I emphasize our learning goal and help students see the bigger picture.

I want to be clear: students should understand the learning goal by the end of the lesson, and I should also communicate to students the purpose of each part of the lesson along the way. Where I disagree with the conventional wisdom is that I don’t want to spend a bunch of time reading the learning goal at the start of the lesson, restating it multiple times, and making sure students can articulate the goal at any point during class. All of that feels like a distraction from the math I want students thinking about along the way.

Two-Step Equations

Here’s another example. Let’s say I want students to solve two-step equations, like 2x + 1 = 11. At the start of class I’ll tell students that we’re learning about a new type of equation today. I won’t stress about “two-step equations” — students might not know what those are yet. Often a goal for this lesson would be written something like “solve two-step equations of the form ax + b =c or ax - b = c where a, b, and c are whole numbers.” That’s a ton of extraneous information. Students don’t need to know the definition of whole numbers or parse what ax + b = c means before launching the lesson.

Again, I would start the lesson with some review and practice of prior knowledge. We would practice equations like 2x = 10 and x + 1 = 11 and lots of other similar equations. We would also practice evaluating expressions like 2x + 1 where x = 5. I would explain to students that we’re practicing these skills because we’ll need them to solve more complicated equations, but that’s it. I don’t want students worried about what those equations look like or what the larger objective is, I want to focus on one-step equations.

Then I introduce two-step equations. Again, I’m not worried about stating the learning goal here. What I want students thinking about is the connection between the one-step equations we were just solving and the new equation I’m showing them. How is 2x + 1 = 11 similar to x + 1 = 11? What happens after I subtract 1 from both sides of each equation? What’s left, and how do we solve that equation? Ok, what if the equation is 2x + 3 = 11? What’s different? I want student thinking laser-focused on my questions, and the connections between one problem and the next. I do not care if they can state the learning goal. That is extraneous load.

Later in the lesson we’ll look at equations with subtraction. Again, I don’t want to say, “hey students, our goal is to solve two-step equations of the form ax + b = c or ax - b = c. Look, we’re about to meet our objective!” This part of the lesson is tricky. Why do we sometimes add and sometimes subtract when solving equations? That’s a hard concept. I want students thinking about the meaning of those operations, not trying to parse the meaning of the learning goal.

As the lesson nears the end, I will step back and help students see what they’ve learned and name these equations as “two-step equations.” But I want to wait until students get some fluency with the math, so they have space in their working memory to see both the forest and the trees.

The Pitfalls of Learning Goals

In any class there will be some students who are more confident with the relevant prior knowledge than others. Some students will arrive to class already fluent with diameter and radius, or proficient with one-step equations. Others will be a bit shaky. Those more fluent students have extra space in their working memory. They can hear a learning goal at the start of class and repeat it back to you throughout the lesson. The students who don’t have that fluency simply do not have the cognitive capacity to do so. Their working memory is busy thinking about what we want them to learn, as it should be.

It’s easy to get this backwards. You might observe that stronger students can keep track of the learning goal, and think that you need to put more emphasis on the learning goal so that all students can keep track of it. That gets the causation backwards. Students aren’t learning because they can keep track of the learning goal. They can keep track of the learning goal because they already have a lot of the skills we want to teach.

I understand where all the emphasis on learning goals comes from. It’s easy as a teacher to lose track of the goal ourselves and end up planning a bunch of activities that don’t have a clear purpose. Every part of a lesson should contribute to student learning.

Also, we should absolutely tell students what they are going to learn. If nothing else, it’s a basic courtesy. My basic framework is to tell students what they’ll be learning at the beginning of the lesson, but use student-friendly language rather than stating a formal learning goal. During the lesson, I’m focused on managing working memory load, connecting new learning to prior knowledge, and making sure students understand what I want them to learn from each chunk of the lesson. By the end of the lesson, the learning goal should be clear to students.

There are all sorts of pitfalls of an emphasis on learning goals. Posting learning goals can become an exercise in compliance: the principal comes around and makes sure the learning goal is written on the board because that’s an easy thing to observe for, never mind whether or not students are learning. I’m not required to do that in my current job but I have been in the past. It always feels like a bit of theater where we go through the motions without any emphasis on whether students are learning. There’s opportunity cost here: all the energy a school spends chasing teachers around and telling them to write the learning goal on the board could be spent on something else.²

Another pitfall is that not every element of a lesson has to connect to a single learning goal. I start and end every class with a bit of mixed retrieval practice. Twice a week we practice fact fluency. Those aren’t tied to the day’s learning goal and that’s fine. I do have clear goals for what I want to accomplish during those times, and I communicate those goals to students. It just isn’t part of one big goal for the lesson.³

My real issue is that, in my experience, an emphasis on learning goals focuses on surface features rather than the substance of learning. Thinking drives learning. Everything I do in the classroom is meant to get students thinking. At best, all of this stuff about learning goals feels like a distraction from thinking. At worst, it can actively interfere with student thinking by overloading working memory at the wrong time.

1. The phrase “Memory is the residue of thought” comes from Dan Willingham.

2. I think a lot of my resistance to learning goals comes from how much I hate the compliance theater of every teacher writing the learning goal on the board so they can get a check on the rubric.

3. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you can check out my multi-stranded approach to curriculum. What I’m describing in this post is a bit different from how I actually run my class, where I typically have multiple parallel learning goals for each lesson.