Reflection in Focus: Setting Learning Goals

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me today for Reflection and Focus-- Setting Learning Goals. The essential questions that we'll be able to answer by the end of today's tutorial are what are some of Marzano's 41 aspects of teacher reflection? What are some outcomes from setting learning goals? What teacher behaviors are involved? And what is a framework for reflection and self-assessment of setting learning goals? Let's start with a quick review of learning goals.

Remember that in his teacher evaluation model, Marzano developed 41 elements of classroom strategies and behaviors. This is where our learning goals are going to come from. They're going to stem from these. And they are divided into three categories. They are routine events, content and on-the-spot behaviors.

An example for routine, providing rigorous learning goals and performance skills and establishing classroom routines. For content, a teacher is going to set a goal that has to do with identifying critical content, helping students elaborate on new information, and engaging students in cognitively complex tasks involving hypothesis generation and testing. And for on-the-spot behaviors, teachers are going to set goals that will help with managing response rates, using friendly controversy, and understanding students' interests and backgrounds.

So the Marzano strategies and behaviors are the teacher strategies and behaviors. And we're going to use these strategies and behaviors to set the learning goals. It's important to remember that when you're setting learning goals you want to make sure that you are clearly articulating the goals to the students and that you're also creating a scale and rubric.

Sometimes the students can even be involved in the creation of this rubric and take some ownership of it. This also provides transparency. I believe it's really our job as teachers not to try to trick students but to give them the tools they need to be successful. So we need to be upfront with them from the very beginning on what we're looking for.

It's also important to set the goals in student-friendly language. And sometimes the students can even help you rewrite the goals. And even though we're setting these big group goals, we want to make sure that we sit down with each student and help them set an individual learning goal as well because it helps them take some more ownership of their learning.

We want to make sure that when we're reflecting on the learning goals we want to examine a couple of different areas. One is the difference between learning goals and assignments. So we want to determine is there a difference between the learning goal and the activity or assignment, and do I communicate these differences to my students effectively? If I don't, how could I do this better? And then I also want to look at how I'm communicating my learning goals.

And we talked about this a little bit on the last slide. Communicate them upfront with the students as soon as you guys start a new unit. Put them in a student-friendly language. Make sure that students understand them. Maybe even have them be involved in the formation of the goals, which is a beautiful segue into the student involvement.

How can we get them involved in the learning goals? Not only are we having them help create the rubrics that we're going to be assessing these goals on and maybe even changing the language of the goals to be more student friendly, but we want the students to be setting their own learning goals as well. And we want to have them explain back to us what our learning goal is so that they can show their understanding of it, et cetera.

OK, let's reflect on this really quickly. Why is it important to have students design their own learning goals? Now think of a goal you have in your classroom right now. How can you communicate this or other goals better in the future?

All right, to review, today, we talked about what some of Marzano's 41 aspects of teacher reflection are. And we talked about what some of the outcomes are for setting goals and what teacher behaviors are involved when setting goals. And we also talked about what a framework is for reflection and self-assessment of setting learning goals.

As you reflect on how this new information can be applied, you may want to explore the additional resources section that accompanies this video presentation. This is where you'll find links to resources chosen to help you deepen your learning and explore ways to apply your newly acquired skill set. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.