Learning goals seem to be the fastest growing classroom tool
in our school board these days. I’ve used them at the beginning and end of
PowerPoint presentations – particularly when the language is new and the
concepts are dense – and I’ve tinkered with developing them along with students
before completing a new reading or discussing a new concept. Students have also posed questions as learning goals on several occasions and that has worked
quite successfully. However, I still thought that I wasn’t always hitting the mark
when it came to using learning goals as effectively as I could with students.
The other day I was chatting on the phone at my colleague’s
desk and I saw a chart that not only outlined learning goals but also allowed
students to organize their thoughts correlated to each goal. It also created a
ranking system for the students to circle what they believed was their level of
understanding of the learning goal by the end of class. Conveniently, this
formed a built-in exit card that required almost no extra work to set up.
Added to this, I had recently discovered a brief PowerPoint presentation online that outlined the changes in the Chinese sport policy since the Second World War. Since we are in the middle of a unit looking at the
Olympics and international sport, there was a link here that could also support
how we understand the changes in the Canadian sport system that have occurred
through programs like Own the Podium and Quest for Gold and thereby lead to a
focus on high performance and elite sport. The challenge was to make the
information on the seemingly distant Chinese sport system accessible to
Canadian students and to create some take away points for these students so the
whole lesson was actually related to what we’ve been discussing.
Fast forward to seeing the learning goals chart and then
taking a stab at making my own chart, complete with the information I wanted
them to be able to leave with by the end of class. I found the five key points
that I felt were most important and created the goals around these points. These
became the first column, then the second column was space for students to write
supporting points on each of the key points and then a third column was added
for a self-evaluation on a five point scale (1 for lowest and 5 for highest) of
learning at the end of class.
It was a little awkward working from two documents – the
slides from the PowerPoint and the learning goals chart – and overall I think
we got a good result for this first time use. I continually asked questions
about the information as we went through it like, “What learning goal could
this fall under?” or “Does this meet any of our learning goal criteria?” which
was a little more structured than I would have liked…however, I felt it
necessary to help create the link between what we were learning and what the
outcome goals were.
Finally, students were able to evaluate themselves on the
“scale” of their learning – a sort of metacognitive measurement – in the last
column of the learning goals chart. In a totally unplanned moment, I collected
the learning goals sheets at the end of class and leafed through them
afterwards. Almost all students had completed the sheet and had evaluated metacognitive
portion on the strength of their understanding at the end of class. Voila, exit
card! And, I was able to quickly see that the majority of students had
comfortably grasped four of the five learning goals.
I handed back the learning goals sheets at the beginning of
the next day, addressed the fuzzy fifth goal that most of the class rated as
less understood and then went on to step into the next lesson. I definitely
plan on using a learning goals chart again in the future as they helped me make
some tough concepts seem simple in the class and made the learning more clear
for the students.
One final thought is that this type of learning is exactly
what I do when I’m coaching, although not with pen and paper. We start an
activity, we define the goals that we need to achieve in order to be successful
and then we evaluate ourselves on these goals through key points or indicators when
we play during practice and in games. What I can’t figure out is why it took me
so long to apply them in the classroom rather than just on the rugby pitch!
