Discover how learning intentions and success criteria can make a difference in your classroom.
Do you use learning intentions and success criteria in your planning? Perhaps you set them with your students at the start of the day or beginning of a lesson. Or maybe you add them to you unit/lesson plans to ensure your lessons and activities stay focused on what you’re trying achieve?
However, their used they really are a great tool. If you haven’t used them before never fear! Let’s dive a bit deeper into what learning intentions are and why and how you should be using them.
Learning intentions, also called objectives, explicitly state what the students are expected to know, do and understand by the end of a lesson or unit. For example, a learning intention from a history lesson might be “At the end of the lesson students will be able to identify natural, human and capital resources.”
Success Criteria are the ways teachers will measure student whether students have met the learning intention. Examples of success criteria for our example learning intention might be.
Students can sort economic resources into the correct categories of natural, human and capital resources.
Students can identify examples of natural, human and capital resources within the school context.
According to AITSL, the use of learning intentions and success criteria in the classroom can benefit both students and teachers. Setting clear expectations and measures for teaching and learning helps to:
- Guide teachers in their planning and teaching by providing a checkpoint for activities and resources.
- Support teachers and students in providing quality feedback that is in-line with the curriculum content and objectives.
- Assist with assessing and reporting student progress.
- Support teachers in evaluating their choice of teaching and learning activities, and identifying any areas needing revision.
- Give students a gauge to measure their progress and identify areas for improvement.
- Remove ambiguity and confusion about the curriculum content and objectives.
To help you use learning intentions in your classroom we’ve created a set of free learning intention and success criteria templates. These templates have been designed so you can enter your own learning intentions and success criteria to display on the board at the beginning of a unit or lesson. They could also be completed by students on a computer or iPad. These templates are available in our Free Resource Library. To gain access become a V.I.T member and be subscribing here.
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We’d love to hear your thoughts on using learning intentions in the classroom. Do you share them with your students? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Happy Teaching
Amy
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