Educational Leadership

Knowing Your Learning Target

The first thing students need to learn
is what they’re supposed to be learning.
Connie M. Moss, Susan M. Brookhart,
and Beverly A. Long

One of Toni Taladay’s students walked into Lenape Elementary School wearing a colorful tie-dyed shirt with a tiny bull’s-eye shape in the lower front corner. That small design caught the eye of his classmate, who exclaimed, “Look, Joey, you’re wearing a learning target!” In the Armstrong School District in southwestern Pennsylvania, learning targets are everywhere: in lesson plans, on bulletin boards, in hallways—and as this story illustrates—firmly on students’ minds.

What Is a Shared Learning Target?

If you own a global positioning system (GPS), you probably can’t imagine taking a trip without it. Unlike a printed map, a GPS provides up-to-the-minute information about where you are, the distance to your destination, how long until you get there, and exactly what to do when you make a wrong turn. But a GPS can’t do any of that without a precise description of where you want to go.

Think of shared learning targets in the same way. They convey to students the destination for the lesson—what to learn, how deeply to learn it, and exactly how to demonstrate their new learning. In our estimation (Moss & Brookhart,

2009) and that of others (Seidle, Rimmele, & Prenzel, 2005; Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2009), the intention for the lesson is one of the most important things students should learn. Without a precise description of where they are headed, too many students are “flying blind.”

The Dangers of Flying Blind

No matter what we decide students need to learn, not much will happen until students understand what they are supposed to learn during a lesson and set their sights on learning it. Regardless of how important the content, how engaging the activity, how formative the assessment, or how differentiated the instruction, unless all students see, recognize, and understand the learning target from the very beginning of the lesson, one factor will remain constant: The teacher will always be the only one providing the direction, focusing on getting students to meet the instructional objectives. The students, on the other hand, will focus on doing what the teacher says, rather than on learning. This flies in the face of what we know about nurturing motivated, self-regulated, and intentional learners (Zimmerman, 2001).