I wish there was an emphatically agree button instead of just “like.” You are spot on in your analysis of your experiences with students. Thank you for writing this piece! I plan to share it widely in my building.
The best time to ask, “What was the learning goal?” is at the end of the lesson. A strong follow-up from a principal is simple: Show me. Explain it. If students can only repeat the activity, they haven’t shown the learning.
Great piece. Learning goals also prompt us to confuse performance for learning. How do you know that they learned it at the end of the lesson? Because they were successful on the exit ticket? Sure, that's an important first step, but how many times have we seen students be able to perform on one day and be confused the next? If learning is a change in long-term memory, then the end-of-lesson exit ticket doesn't meet the standard for if learning occurred.
I appreciate this article. I remember being in middle school more than a decade ago when the school system suddenly got very strict about making the teachers state the learning objectives, repeat them to the class, and have the class repeat them back to the teacher throughout the lesson. At the time it felt so silly and useless. And as a current medical student who is still plagued by learning objectives, I feel the same way.
I’m not saying any of this to say that learning objectives are pointless, just emphasizing that I’m coming at this from a place of ignorance regarding why learning objectives have been deemed so important in this way. To me, learning objectives always seemed like something important for the teacher to know, so they could guide the lesson, but not particularly useful for the student, at least not upfront.
In the pre-clinical part of medical school, it got to a point of ridiculousness that I sort of fell away from using the school’s approach to the curriculum to learn and started reading the lecture titles and going to 3rd party resources to learn the relevant material (very common approach for med students). My school particularly had a way of making learning objectives 5-10+ part goals that were so broad and all-encompassing as to completely lose utility. My school would release 25 or more of these multi-part learning objectives on a Wednesday that they wanted you, in a small group of students, to self-learn and teach each other for a quiz by Friday. I just could not get behind it; and to this day, deeply feel that they had strayed extremely far from the ultimate goal and representation of what learning objectives were meant to be.
Interesting to hear it from the student perspective!
Anecdotally it seems to me like a lot of med students become experts at learning science out of necessity. There's so much to learn, the teaching quality is uneven, so they figure out how to maximize learning efficiently like you're describing.
I'm from Australia and we are huge on learning goals. At my school I'm forced to get kids to write them at the start of every math lesson. If I don't keep them insanely short and sharp I can loose 10 minutes of valuable lesson time. I also often keep them super broad because I don't want to give away the lesson at the start.. For example I want to build a headache first and then provide the aspirin (Dan Meyer style). The time it takes me to creatively think about how to juggle the beauacratic requirement with my actual lesson goals is painstaking ..
I think Hattie is responsible for this push as apparently they come with a 0.68 effective size when compared to no learning goals. I know you have written about Hattie before... I've recently been reading Stephen Vainker as he is following Hattie and some interesting investigations seem to be taking place... https://stephenvainker.substack.com/p/how-empty-legal-threats-and-a-corrupt
What research is responsible for the learnings goals push in the US? I am often wondering if the research is the problem or the systems interpretation of the research and its limitations, but as an early career teacher struggling to find time to juggle it all - I have no chance to pursue these thoughts any further.
I'm also pretty sure my daughters primary school doesn't make homework compulsory (even in the latter years for high school preparation (5 & 6) because Hattie showed a low effect size.. This primary school feeds into my high school and poor homework habits are evidenced across the entire school. It seems primary schools in the area have taken this research, interpreted it as "don't bother with homework" and now kids are turning up to high school ill-prepared to consolidate learning at home.
I've just taught my first term this year and tracked homework consistently for the first time using my ex corporate excel skills, lots of colour coding to capture high quality data. The top 4 students in every single one of my classes has 100% homework completion and completes to a high standard, full workings, marks the work and makes corrections when they make mistakes. All the elements I assess when looking at their homework ... Obviously this is a very poor sample size but I'm already convinced the Hattie effect sizes are a fairly rubbish measure to be relying on in the way the education department has in my area.
Being required to have students copy down the learning goal would drive me crazy.
I have never seen anything beyond broad “Hattie’s effect size” stuff to justify learning goals. I have never dug into that research, and I am very curious what the comparison there is. If they’re comparing a lesson with a clear goal to a lesson with a bunch of random activities, sure, but that’s not testing the bureaucratic requirements we’re talking about. I think most of the reasoning is that 1) learning goals are easy to observe for, 2) lessons with random activities that aren’t purposeful are bad, 3) administrators feel like it makes observations easier because they can figure out more easily the objective.
re: homework, I feel torn. My read of the research is that consistent, short, straightforward homework is good for students regardless of the age and also helps to keep families in touch with what their kids are learning. That said, I think most real-world homework is too long, too hard, or too confusing. So there’s this challenge: do you support homework in its platonic ideal, or homework as it actually tends to happen? I don’t know that I feel very supportive of typical homework practices, and all that research came before current-generation AI makes cheating far easier. All of that subtlety is the kind of stuff that gets completely lost when Hattie effect sizes are all we talk about in terms of research.
Hopefully learning goals will turn out to be another fad that ultimately dies …
As for homework, my context text this year is senior classes preparing for Higher School Certificate and university admissions scores … so they need to be working independently at home by now to consolidate learning. Agree for younger grades should be very short and sweet and on point (nothing new). I’ve got my grade 2 daughter doing the jump program at home books and they are amazing.
Definitely with you here. I've always tried to divorce learning goals from the context in which we are exploring them. So, the context might be two-step equations but the learning goal is about equivalency and equivalent equations. Circles might be the context, but the learning goal is measurement or perimeter maybe in this case. My theory is with fewer, but bigger picture, learning goals that we return to often, students will have a better grasp of the overall structure of the mathematics.
There's a lot to appreciate in this piece. The argument that teachers shouldn't turn recitation of learning goals into compliance theater is correct. The observation about working memory — that fluent students can hold the goal in mind precisely because they aren't using working memory to process the content — is genuinely insightful. It gets the causation right where most observers get it backwards.
But your writing, in my opinion, stops just short of the more important question.
When you say your goal is for students to "understand circumference," or to "solve two-step equations," you seem to treat those targets as self-evident. You've rightly decided that when to state the goal matters. You haven't asked what the goal is.
This is not a trivial distinction. Does "understanding circumference" mean a student can execute the calculation? That they can explain why π appears in the formula? That they can recognize circumferential relationships in novel physical situations? That they can construct the concept from its relationship to diameter, radius, and arc length? These are not the same targets. The instructional design that serves one may actively undermine another. And a teacher who hasn't answered that question hasn't actually defined the learning goal — they've just deferred the problem.
Thank you for what you do and for your writing. I hope these ideas support future emergence and more writing.
You're describing a real problem but don't think learning goals are a helpful solution. I've seen attempts to wordsmith everything you're describing into a learning goal and it becomes a mess. I think a better approach is to have a bunch of examples of the questions we want students to be able to solve, and to use those as the end goal. Examples often illustrate a concept much better than language can.
That is exactly my thinking. I wouldn't use the word "examples," but would use a narrative-driven activity. If useful, you might check out the work and research at our Institute that describes these things: https://mathtrack.co/professional-development
I'm not asking if you want to join this group, just providing further information to elucidate my perspective.
This is how we work with teaching groups to establish these things. Learning goals suffer from the antiquated notion of learning as something to be acquired, like receiving a package in the mail. The goals for learning mathematical concepts are situated locally and "decided" upon by the local teaching community, at least when given the opportunity to do that work.
I agree with you, but more importantly so did the authors of the IM curriculum. The student materials start with a statement in student language like "let's explore the circumference of circles" and end with a synthesis that describes what was learned. The teacher materials do have more formal learning targets but they are intentionally not in the student materials. This reminds me of the days after the Common Core came out when teachers were supposed to put the standard of the day on the board.
I wish there was an emphatically agree button instead of just “like.” You are spot on in your analysis of your experiences with students. Thank you for writing this piece! I plan to share it widely in my building.
The best time to ask, “What was the learning goal?” is at the end of the lesson. A strong follow-up from a principal is simple: Show me. Explain it. If students can only repeat the activity, they haven’t shown the learning.
Great piece. Learning goals also prompt us to confuse performance for learning. How do you know that they learned it at the end of the lesson? Because they were successful on the exit ticket? Sure, that's an important first step, but how many times have we seen students be able to perform on one day and be confused the next? If learning is a change in long-term memory, then the end-of-lesson exit ticket doesn't meet the standard for if learning occurred.
I appreciate this article. I remember being in middle school more than a decade ago when the school system suddenly got very strict about making the teachers state the learning objectives, repeat them to the class, and have the class repeat them back to the teacher throughout the lesson. At the time it felt so silly and useless. And as a current medical student who is still plagued by learning objectives, I feel the same way.
I’m not saying any of this to say that learning objectives are pointless, just emphasizing that I’m coming at this from a place of ignorance regarding why learning objectives have been deemed so important in this way. To me, learning objectives always seemed like something important for the teacher to know, so they could guide the lesson, but not particularly useful for the student, at least not upfront.
In the pre-clinical part of medical school, it got to a point of ridiculousness that I sort of fell away from using the school’s approach to the curriculum to learn and started reading the lecture titles and going to 3rd party resources to learn the relevant material (very common approach for med students). My school particularly had a way of making learning objectives 5-10+ part goals that were so broad and all-encompassing as to completely lose utility. My school would release 25 or more of these multi-part learning objectives on a Wednesday that they wanted you, in a small group of students, to self-learn and teach each other for a quiz by Friday. I just could not get behind it; and to this day, deeply feel that they had strayed extremely far from the ultimate goal and representation of what learning objectives were meant to be.
Interesting to hear it from the student perspective!
Anecdotally it seems to me like a lot of med students become experts at learning science out of necessity. There's so much to learn, the teaching quality is uneven, so they figure out how to maximize learning efficiently like you're describing.
I'm from Australia and we are huge on learning goals. At my school I'm forced to get kids to write them at the start of every math lesson. If I don't keep them insanely short and sharp I can loose 10 minutes of valuable lesson time. I also often keep them super broad because I don't want to give away the lesson at the start.. For example I want to build a headache first and then provide the aspirin (Dan Meyer style). The time it takes me to creatively think about how to juggle the beauacratic requirement with my actual lesson goals is painstaking ..
I think Hattie is responsible for this push as apparently they come with a 0.68 effective size when compared to no learning goals. I know you have written about Hattie before... I've recently been reading Stephen Vainker as he is following Hattie and some interesting investigations seem to be taking place... https://stephenvainker.substack.com/p/how-empty-legal-threats-and-a-corrupt
What research is responsible for the learnings goals push in the US? I am often wondering if the research is the problem or the systems interpretation of the research and its limitations, but as an early career teacher struggling to find time to juggle it all - I have no chance to pursue these thoughts any further.
I'm also pretty sure my daughters primary school doesn't make homework compulsory (even in the latter years for high school preparation (5 & 6) because Hattie showed a low effect size.. This primary school feeds into my high school and poor homework habits are evidenced across the entire school. It seems primary schools in the area have taken this research, interpreted it as "don't bother with homework" and now kids are turning up to high school ill-prepared to consolidate learning at home.
I've just taught my first term this year and tracked homework consistently for the first time using my ex corporate excel skills, lots of colour coding to capture high quality data. The top 4 students in every single one of my classes has 100% homework completion and completes to a high standard, full workings, marks the work and makes corrections when they make mistakes. All the elements I assess when looking at their homework ... Obviously this is a very poor sample size but I'm already convinced the Hattie effect sizes are a fairly rubbish measure to be relying on in the way the education department has in my area.
Being required to have students copy down the learning goal would drive me crazy.
I have never seen anything beyond broad “Hattie’s effect size” stuff to justify learning goals. I have never dug into that research, and I am very curious what the comparison there is. If they’re comparing a lesson with a clear goal to a lesson with a bunch of random activities, sure, but that’s not testing the bureaucratic requirements we’re talking about. I think most of the reasoning is that 1) learning goals are easy to observe for, 2) lessons with random activities that aren’t purposeful are bad, 3) administrators feel like it makes observations easier because they can figure out more easily the objective.
re: homework, I feel torn. My read of the research is that consistent, short, straightforward homework is good for students regardless of the age and also helps to keep families in touch with what their kids are learning. That said, I think most real-world homework is too long, too hard, or too confusing. So there’s this challenge: do you support homework in its platonic ideal, or homework as it actually tends to happen? I don’t know that I feel very supportive of typical homework practices, and all that research came before current-generation AI makes cheating far easier. All of that subtlety is the kind of stuff that gets completely lost when Hattie effect sizes are all we talk about in terms of research.
Hopefully learning goals will turn out to be another fad that ultimately dies …
As for homework, my context text this year is senior classes preparing for Higher School Certificate and university admissions scores … so they need to be working independently at home by now to consolidate learning. Agree for younger grades should be very short and sweet and on point (nothing new). I’ve got my grade 2 daughter doing the jump program at home books and they are amazing.
Definitely with you here. I've always tried to divorce learning goals from the context in which we are exploring them. So, the context might be two-step equations but the learning goal is about equivalency and equivalent equations. Circles might be the context, but the learning goal is measurement or perimeter maybe in this case. My theory is with fewer, but bigger picture, learning goals that we return to often, students will have a better grasp of the overall structure of the mathematics.
Thanks for this Dylan.
You inspired me to write a reply.
Hope to talk to you soon.
There's a lot to appreciate in this piece. The argument that teachers shouldn't turn recitation of learning goals into compliance theater is correct. The observation about working memory — that fluent students can hold the goal in mind precisely because they aren't using working memory to process the content — is genuinely insightful. It gets the causation right where most observers get it backwards.
But your writing, in my opinion, stops just short of the more important question.
When you say your goal is for students to "understand circumference," or to "solve two-step equations," you seem to treat those targets as self-evident. You've rightly decided that when to state the goal matters. You haven't asked what the goal is.
This is not a trivial distinction. Does "understanding circumference" mean a student can execute the calculation? That they can explain why π appears in the formula? That they can recognize circumferential relationships in novel physical situations? That they can construct the concept from its relationship to diameter, radius, and arc length? These are not the same targets. The instructional design that serves one may actively undermine another. And a teacher who hasn't answered that question hasn't actually defined the learning goal — they've just deferred the problem.
Thank you for what you do and for your writing. I hope these ideas support future emergence and more writing.
You're describing a real problem but don't think learning goals are a helpful solution. I've seen attempts to wordsmith everything you're describing into a learning goal and it becomes a mess. I think a better approach is to have a bunch of examples of the questions we want students to be able to solve, and to use those as the end goal. Examples often illustrate a concept much better than language can.
That is exactly my thinking. I wouldn't use the word "examples," but would use a narrative-driven activity. If useful, you might check out the work and research at our Institute that describes these things: https://mathtrack.co/professional-development
I'm not asking if you want to join this group, just providing further information to elucidate my perspective.
This is how we work with teaching groups to establish these things. Learning goals suffer from the antiquated notion of learning as something to be acquired, like receiving a package in the mail. The goals for learning mathematical concepts are situated locally and "decided" upon by the local teaching community, at least when given the opportunity to do that work.
I agree with you, but more importantly so did the authors of the IM curriculum. The student materials start with a statement in student language like "let's explore the circumference of circles" and end with a synthesis that describes what was learned. The teacher materials do have more formal learning targets but they are intentionally not in the student materials. This reminds me of the days after the Common Core came out when teachers were supposed to put the standard of the day on the board.
Yea that's one thing I like about IM. Trying to communicate standards to students sounds crazy, that's the end result of compliance run amok.