Learning Intention...I intend for you to learn something? Teacher in control
Success Criteria...to be successful you have to complete the learning in this set way? Teacher in control
We are Learning To...are we? Or am I telling you...
What I'm Looking For...Am I the only one who can judge success?
Don't get me wrong...students being clear about what it is they are doing, and clear about what it is meant to be like is super important. It's the way that these things are framed to the learners that I've been struggling with. Is using those acronyms, and breaking down the learning into tiny, tiny parcels of learning, really making things clearer for them?
A maths advisor we worked with once said the content of the purple Numeracy books is gold, but the way it was written was garbage. The Learning Intentions inside those texts...they are so narrow, so precise...how do you write success criteria for them? Are they really what we wanted children to learn, or were they a part of a bigger whole?
Absolum's Clarity in the Classroom (awesome text) promotes having Global Learning Intentions, big picture stuff that smaller learning intentions/criteria can come from. Our Assessment for Learning PLD taught us that having these clear in the minds of the students first, before bombarding them with the miniature ones, is key. Co-construction of criteria is another important part of helping learners get 'inside' their learning, letting them have agency enough to describe what good learning looks like. All fantastic stuff, but still I persisted with the WALT/WILF labels, and I feel these limited my thinking, and that of the kids.
We, like may schools, also have progressions...for reading, writing and maths. These form the basis of consistently assessing learners across the school, and help identify gaps and next steps in learning. Nothing wrong with that, except it has meant that learning in literacy has become as detailed/splintered and fragmented as that in Numeracy. Do we really want to work on the fine detail in isolation...is the learning really to "Use most grammatical conventions correctly eg. Correct form of simple, compound and complex sentences and use of pro-nouns and prepositions" Is that what quality writing really is? Do that by itself, learn that in isolation, and you are a better writer?
We identified an issue with our Boys and their writing this year (like many other no doubt). Across Terms 2 and 3 I worked with a boys-only group, mixed ability, but mainly those at-risk-of-not-meeting-the-damn-standard boys. It has been primo, and we managed (together) to create a culture within the group that writing is awesome, and that we are all authors. Writing chapter books for fun, and taking pleasure from using great language...but, all the while I was persisting with the 'normal' LI/SC/WALT/WILF way of framing learning.
Towards the end of Term 3 I'd gathered my thoughts enough to make a change...I wanted the lads to opt into workshops based on what they wanted to learn as a writer. To do this I couldn't have the LI's come from our writing progressions, I had to group bundles of them together and try it a different way. I now use titles for workshops (currently my co-teacher and I are running a Star Wars themed literacy class)...so titles like 'I've got a bad feeling about this', or 'Metaphors (may the force) be with you'. These serve to capture their attention. Going with that is 'We will'...what will we actually do...not what I intend for them to do. 'We will': "make sure that our readers knows what Han is feeling, trying not to just say ‘he is scared’". Then the 'How'...how will you actually do that: Decide on the feeling or emotion. Describe how you would feel, without using the word (what would you be doing, what would your body be doing, what would you say?). Lastly, we have an example: "Han looked ahead, the walls of the canyon were getting tighter and tighter. His hands on the throttle were white knuckled as he flipped his ship on its side. He closed his eyes tightly, and wished for the best. A second later he opened them... he couldn’t believe his luck! "Wahoo" he screamed into the headset"
It's not radically different, but now the children are clearer about what they are going to do, how they will do it, and what it will look like in the end. The little examples are great...they can look at them and decide if they need that skill, if they are able to write in that way or not. The learning isn't one little piece anymore, often several skills bundled together. I want the How (the SC) to be very actions based...what are they actually going to do and see...this makes self/peer feedback so much easier.
My co-teacher and I run a series of these workshops each day, in parallel, based on the same piece of writing. The next step I can see is for us to make it clear how each of these workshops (each of these examples of writing) adds up to being a quality writer.
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