Learning Targets

So, day two of "Quality Assessment" training concluded today and was full of more great information and resources.

I'm going to keep this blog post brief so you can get right to the resource and have time to enjoy your weekend, rather than spend the whole thing trying to read through my long winded post! :)

I love the idea of students knowing the learning target... and not just knowing it or having it posted on their assessment (which I also LOVE!) but being accountable and responsible to keep track of how they are meeting it and reflect on their own level of mastery.

So, I adapted the following document from one I was given today that was originally made by Lighthouse Learning Community, Inc. Mine is a little more basic but I made it fillable so that you can put in your own subject and type in your own kid-friendly "I can" statements related to the learning target. The other columns for evidence, however, are not fillable because that is where the students will document tasks they have done that relate to the learning target.

Now, I'm not so crazy to think that my kids will do this on their own. So even though I will be telling them what tasks to write where for their evidence, I think that it will be powerful for them to do the documentation. I also figure that I will have them rate their level of understanding/mastery after the addition of each task with a pencil... that way as they complete more tasks, they can change their level of mastery if they need to.

I don't have the logistics of this worked out yet, but I'm envisioning some sort of "data folder" for each kid where they will have several of these sheets, graphs for graphing math fact mastery, etc... and I will pre-make these before school begins with the most essential of essential learning targets in each one. I hope that makes sense!

Look for more posts in the future about learning targets... I'm all jazzed about this now and feel like a bad teacher for not having realized the importance of this before! The presenter said something that I'll leave you with that helps me keep things like this in perspective... she said, "What we know today does not make what we did yesterday wrong". How powerful is that?!

So, I guess this post didn't turn out to be that short after all... once I simmer down about this blogging thing, hopefully I'll learn to be more concise! :)