Five Ways to Make Learning Objectives Actually Useful

The Question

I’ll start with a confession. For a long time, my learning objectives were a copy and paste job. I’d lift the specification point straight from the exam board, put it on the front slide surrounded by a few key words, and leave it alone after that. To the point where my pupils probably couldn’t have told you what it said by the end of the lesson!

Early in my career, I went one step further and had pupils copy them down. My thinking was, “Great, more in the books, and they can refer back to it.” What I was actually doing was taking five minutes of learning time. In a fifty-minute lesson, that’s 10% gone, doing very little.

What I do now is feed the objective into the lesson as success criteria that pupils can actually tick off and check their work against. They come in with the I Do and stay with pupils through the We Do and You Do, right up to the Review. So the question for this first Toolkit post is a practical one: how do we turn the objective on the slide into something pupils actually use?

The Thinking

Copying objectives down was a habit I had to train myself out of, and I don’t think I was alone. Across my own teaching and the lessons I’ve been lucky enough to visit, the same three things come up again and again. One, the objective is written to fill a space, because the slide template has a box for it. Two, even a well thought out objective goes up at the start and doesn’t come back. Three, “copy down the learning objectives”. None of this comes from poor teaching. Busy teachers are working to a template.

Three pieces of research explain why success criteria are worth trying.

John Hattie and Helen Timperley’s 2007 review, The Power of Feedback, argues that effective feedback helps a learner answer three questions: Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? If a pupil can’t answer the first, the other two have nothing to hang on. A clear objective answers the first question; success criteria, revisited during the lesson, answer the second and third.

Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment puts clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and success criteria first among his five key strategies. Notice that last word. Putting an objective on a slide is sharing it. It isn’t the same as pupils understanding it. Wiliam also warns against confusing what pupils will DO with what they will LEARN, which is exactly what a pasted specification point tends to do.

Shirley Clarke’s Outstanding Formative Assessment (2014) is where success criteria become practical. For Clarke, they break the learning into the steps or ingredients that make it up, and they work best when pupils help to build them, often by comparing a strong example with a weaker one.

The Redraft

Here’s the strategy in five steps. The model below shows them at work in one lesson, a physics lesson on current in series and parallel circuits, so tap through it for the whole lesson at a glance. Underneath, each step is explained in full, with quick examples from other subjects. Swap in your own content as you read; the steps don’t change.

1. Start with the bigger picture. Before you write a word of the objective, ask where this lesson sits in the curriculum and the medium-term plan. What came before, and what does it need to set up next? In maths, solving two-step equations builds on inverse operations and sets up rearranging formulae. Knowing that tells you what has to be secure by the end, and what can wait.
2. Write the learning, not the activity. A pasted specification point tells pupils what the exam board wants. “To complete the circuits practical” tells them what they’ll be doing. Neither tells them what they’ll learn. Avoid “understand” and “know”, because we can’t see them happening, and choose a verb that produces evidence you can see or hear. In English, “To read chapter three” becomes “To explain how the writer builds tension in chapter three.”
3. Break it into success criteria. Ask yourself: what would I need to see in a pupil’s answer to know they’ve met the objective? Each answer is a criterion. Write them as “I can” statements, build them in order and finish with a stretch. Where you can, build them with the class, as Clarke suggests: show a strong answer next to a weaker one and ask what the strong one does that the other doesn’t. My test is simple. If you can’t point to a criterion in a pupil’s book, it isn’t a criterion yet.
4. Plan the lesson around them. Every stage of the lesson should have a job linked to the criteria:
   • Do Now (retrieval): quick questions on what pupils need to bring with them.
   • I Do (teacher exposition): teach the new content in small steps, signposting each criterion as you reach it: “This is the part that answers criterion two.”
   • We Do (class rehearsal): pupils rehearse each criterion on mini whiteboards, with cold calling and whole-class feedback, before anyone works alone.
   • You Do (application): pupils apply it independently, ideally to something unfamiliar.
   • Review: recap the key content against the criteria before moving on with the curriculum.
5. Check them, then tick them off. Pupils ticking their own criteria is a start, but if I’m honest it isn’t reliable: pupils will happily tick something they haven’t quite got. The check I trust most is live marking. During the You Do, circulate with a pen and mark against the criteria in real time. When you see a criterion met, tick it next to the evidence. When one is missing, write its number in the margin, so the pupil knows exactly what to fix while there’s still time in the lesson. That tick from the teacher is where the sense of achievement really lands. Live marking also tells you about the whole class: if half the room is missing criterion three, stop and reteach it, then make it the focus of the Review. That’s Hattie and Timperley’s “How am I going?” and “Where to next?”, answered in the lesson, not weeks later in a pile of books.

And some honest notes on what to watch out for, because this didn’t all work first time:

• Four criteria can quietly become a ceiling. Some pupils will do exactly four things and stop, which is why the last one should always be a stretch.
• Don’t let the criteria become the new thing to copy down! Put them on the slide or a printed checklist instead, or you’ve just swapped one copying habit for another.
• Know which criterion will trip pupils up. In the circuits lesson it’s criterion two, because so many pupils believe current always splits equally. Have the reteach ready before you need it.

The Reflection

One thing I haven’t settled is whether the objective should ALWAYS go up in minute one. Sometimes the best way into a topic is a puzzle or a demonstration, and announcing the answer first spoils it. Wiliam accepts there are times when it’s better not to tell pupils straight away. My thinking is that pupils should know where they’re going by the time it matters, and that coming back to it matters more than when it first goes up.

If you want to try it on Monday, copy the five step headings into your planning and write one line under each for your own lesson. The circuits model above is exactly that plan, filled in.

What I am sure about is that the five minutes I used to spend on copying are better spent on learning. So here’s my current draft: fewer objectives copied, more objectives used. I’ve no doubt I’ll redraft it.

Take what’s useful, change what isn’t, and let me know how it goes. Where do learning objectives really earn their place in your lessons, and where could they be working harder?

Every lesson is a draft. Share what you’d redraft in the comments.