This week’s learning walks are going to focus on learning intentions, success criteria and metacognition. So what do we mean by these?
Learning Intentions: our teaching policy states that we want pupils to explicitly know what it is we are trying to learn. This means that we need to share our learning intentions with students, in other words we need to explain what it is we are trying to learn in the lesson. As part of our planning we not only need to think about the subject specific content we are trying to teach, but also the generic skills that students will be developing as they learn our subject. By explicitly discussing how we learn and what skills and techniques we use when learning we can hopefully, make our students more aware of the skills they use when learning and be able to makes links between different subjects as they see themselves employing similar skills in different subject areas. Learning intentions should focus on what we want students to learn - not on what tasks we want them to complete!
Success Criteria: if we want our students to become more skilled learners we need to communicate what successful learning looks like. In our planning we should be thinking about what successful learning would look like in our lesson and flagging this up to our pupils. This should be more sophisticated than stating that they should have completed tasks 1 to 12, but should reflect how their understanding has developed. The English department has done some really interesting work on this. They frame their success criteria through the concepts of a piece of work being skilled or excellent. Each is clearly described and communicated to the students who are then encouraged to make judgements about their own and others work.
Metacognition: this is often described as ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘learning to learn’. So, if in our learning intentions we are discussing with students what we want to learn, how we intend to do this and why we use different approaches to different tasks. And through our success criteria we discuss how we can make judgements about how well we are picking up knowledge, concepts, ideas and skills -then we are working in a metacognitive way.
In this week’s TLCs we will be discussing what makes good learning intentions and success criteria. To make the most of this it would be well worth spending a little time thinking about our planning and how we fit learning objectives and success criteria into it.
For further information and ideas click on the links below:
Metacognition
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