Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson

by Connie M. Moss, Susan M. Brookhart

Overview

In Learning Targets, Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson—what they call "today's lesson"—or it doesn't happen at all.

The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards.

Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book

- Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice.
- Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation.
- Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target.
- Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading.

Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment.

What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416614418
Publisher:	ASCD
Publication date:	07/02/2012
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	790,404
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Learning Targets: A Theory of Action

2: How to Design Learning Targets

3: Sharing Learning Targets with Students

4: Using Learning Targets to Feed Learning Forward

5: Developing Assessment-Capable Students

6: Using Learning Targets to Differentiate Instruction

7: Using Learning Targets to Foster Higher-Order Thinking

8: Using Learning Targets to Guide Summative Assessment and Grading

9: A Learning Target Theory of Action and Educational Leadership: Building a Culture of Evidence

Action Tools

Download Instructions

A: Understanding Learning Targets

B: Learning Target Classroom Walk-Through Guide

C: Learning Target Lesson-Planning Process Guide

D: Teacher Self-Assessment Targets and Look-Fors Guide

E: Student Self-Assessment and Intentional Learning Guide

F: No More "Garbage In, Garbage Out": Understanding Connections Among Instruction, Assessment, and Grading

Glossary

References

Index

About the Authors