Guidelines for Writing SPECIFIC Daily Learning Targets

Think about what students should be able to do specifically by the end of THAT LESSON. o Students need to have an explicit target for THAT SPECIFIC DAY/LESSON, not only a broader standard or goal pulled from the Common Core. o In ELA, for example, make the target specific to the text youre reading. If the standard youre working toward is: RI.4.8. Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text, and youre reading an article about the Civil War by Tom Smith, you might say: Explain how Smith uses evidence about the North and the South to support his argument about the causes of the Civil War. Make sure its written in a STUDENT-FRIENDLY way, so that students can understand and explain it (without your assistance) to someone who asked. Display the objective PROMINENTLY in your classroom. It should be the most obvious thing for students to see and find!

EXAMPLE FROM COMMON CORES INSTITUTE ON FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT:

K-2 Mathematics:
Essential Concept from Learning Progression: Sort, classify, and order objects by size, number, and other properties.
This is the STANDARD (or learning progression) that youre working towards.

Learning Goal: Understand that objects have characteristics and can be sorted and classified according to those characteristics.
These are your DAILY LEARNING TARGETS. They are attainable within a single lesson, they build towards a larger goal, and they give students a criteria by which to determine whether or not theyve gotten it that day.

This is equal to what youre working on in a particular unit or series of lessons; usually CANNOT be accomplished in a single days lesson!

Success Criteria:

I can identify the rule used to sort a group of objects. I can identify the characteristics that are common in a group of objects. I can sort objects using single and multiple attributes. I can explain the sorting rule I used to sort the objects. I can re-sort those same objects using a different sorting rule and explain my thinking.