In my district, we adopted a new framework for teacher
evaluation, UW CEL, and I learned a new phrase: Teaching point. What's that,
you ask? Learning target, learning goal,
performance expectation, lesson objective, power standard: while they each have
an important nuance of meaning, they all refer to what students should
understand or be able to do by the end of a certain period of time.
Posting those learning targets every day so they are visible
to all? Yeah, I've never done that, for
a variety of reasons. However, I have
repeatedly heard that all three frameworks in our state are based on research, and
hey, I want my students to learn, so when I read in our district’s framework
rubric about daily posting as one possible way of communicating learning targets,
I figured–I'm game, I'll give it a try—and I have been posting these in class
for the last two weeks.
I shared what I was doing with a fellow teacher—and we had a
very animated discussion (raised voices in the copy room!) about the pros and
cons of posting learning targets and how this might or might not fit into
teacher evaluation. I will say I put
some thought into how and when during my lessons I was going to post these targets
and discuss them with the students. I knew that for many lessons, about the
last thing that would be helpful would be to have a posted learning target at
the beginning of a lesson.
