Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 7th November 2011

Learning Walks

Week Beginning Monday 7^th November 2011

This week we have been visiting year 10 lessons to look at Learning Intentions, Success Criteria and Metacognition.  This week’s post will hopefully promote some discussion on how best we share our learning objectives and success criteria with students.  I am not sure that I will be providing many answers, so as with last week if you have suggestions on how to develop best practice; then please post a comment.

There were many examples of learning intentions and success criteria being shared with students. Most students were able to explain what they were doing and why they working on a particular task.  In addition they were able to talk about what they needed to do to complete this task successfully.  This was most common when activities were task or process driven.  Students were also able to talk about how tasks and skills related to their exam work or coursework.  The awareness students are showing regarding their course requirements is really good.

Students were less confident about explaining what skills they were developing and why these were important beyond the classroom experience, however, this was not the case in every lesson.   On occasions, teachers had clearly shared their learning intentions with their students, but the students had either forgotten or could not quite remember in detail what these were.  In lessons where students are developing a set body of knowledge, skills and understanding over a series of lessons, it becomes even more important to think through how the learning objectives and success criteria are revisited to keep these issues at the forefront of students’ learning.   How we solve this is a key challenge for us as it is not appropriate to have students copy learning objectives and success criteria down, nor is it possible to permanently have them displayed on a PowerPoint.  The goal is to enable students to know what it is they are trying to learn and to be able to evaluate how well they are doing this, without them having to rely on a prompt to be able to explain this. Students that can do this are developing their metacognative skills, and our challenge is to get all students to be able to improve their ability to become more independent learners.

17 lessons were visited this week.