Have you noticed the rise in teachers’ obsessions with “learning targets?” Perhaps you’ve heard the familiar “I will… So I can… I will know I’ve got it when…” or maybe you’ve even heard them complaining about it.
Well Pritya Faransis, a 12th grader, has heard her teachers mentioning them more frequently than usual. She, like many other students, say the learning targets “don’t help learning at all.” Pritya has also observed that her teachers have only recently started emphasizing them, leading her to believe this is another policy introduced by Dr. Healey.
After speaking with several teachers, it turns out she’s exactly right. “This comes from Healy,” said an English teacher who preferred to remain anonymous, “it is not a county-led initiative.” The teacher explained that this has been a major focus this year, adding that “almost all our meetings have been about learning targets.”
Pritya isn’t alone in her opinion. Two teachers who also chose to remain anonymous, said they not only “don’t find them helpful,” but that “they are a waste of time.” A particularly passionate teacher even took to saying “if [the learning targets] are designed to have an impact on students, why is no one asking the students what they think?”
Interestingly, this concern is partly acknowledged by Dr. Healey himself. He admitted that he has not yet directly spoken with students about learning targets, explaining that this is the first year the school has focused heavily on them and that meaningful implementation is “not a one-year process.”
Healey also recognizes that the transition hasn’t been easy, he noted that some teachers may find the shift difficult. Healy encouraged staff to take more of a growth mindset approach as they adapt. From his perspective, learning targets are meant to improve collaboration among teachers and create more consistency in instruction, rather than simply be another requirement.
Still, there appears to be a disconnect between intention and reality in the classroom. If both students and teachers feel the targets aren’t helpful, what is Healey ultimately trying to accomplish?
According to Jason Kennedy, a writer for the Medium submagazine, Teachers on Fire, learning targets, when implemented correctly, can be very effective tools of learning. Setting clear goals helps students achieve them and setting a clear end product goal helps them to know what to work towards. Students “can’t have a criteria for success if there is no target to shoot for in the first place.”
However, Kennedy realizes that for learning targets to be successful in a classroom setting, teachers have to be properly taught how to implement them. Teachers can’t treat them as a “box to check,” and just “posting and pointing to them” won’t be effective. He says that teachers need to focus less on compliance and administration mandates and more on learning.
Kennedy summarizes the idea with a simple analogy: “We can’t begin a journey if we do not first know our destination.”
It seems that Healey’s initiative is grounded in a reasonable goal – improving clarity and student outcomes – but somewhere between administration and the classroom, the message is getting lost.
