Integrating Teaching & Learning: “Timeless Essentials” for Creating Integrated Units of Study
During my 24 years of classroom teaching, I often co-created rubrics with my students so they would know exactly how to succeed on classroom projects and performance tasks. But when I learned about Success Criteria years later, I could only wish that I had known about this powerful practice “back in the day!”
In Volume One, Chapter 6, of my new book series, Integrating Teaching and Learning: “Timeless Essentials” for Creating Integrated Units of Study, I share in detail how to align Success Criteria to Student Learning Targets. Today’s blog post introduces this powerful education practice that all educators in all grades and content areas can easily implement in their own classrooms and instructional programs.
WHAT ARE SUCCESS CRITERIA?
Together with Student Learning Targets that communicate to students WHAT they are to learn, Success Criteria provide explicit verb phrases to show students HOW they will demonstrate that they have learned it. Success Criteria make clear for learners in specific, objective wording exactly what they need to write, say, and/or do as valid evidence that they have successfully “hit” the Student Learning Target(s). Think of Success Criteria as a detailed “roadmap” to the identified learning destination. Each criterion is a “checkpoint” on the journey. When students complete all the “checkpoints”, they have arrived!
WHY SUCCESS CRITERIA?
Students are often confused about what they are supposed to be learning and unsure if they have been successful in learning it. Equally confusing for them can be why they received a certain grade or a score on their submitted assignments. As a result, they often resign themselves to the powerless conclusion: “I don’t know why I got this grade. It’s what the teacher gave me.”
Because the purpose of Success Criteria is to communicate performance expectations in precise,specific terms, students can feel confident of ultimate success even while they are completing an assignment. How? By referring continually to the provided Success Criteria, they can check their work against the Success Criteria as they create it, changing and adding to it while doing so. In this way they can be sure that they have successfully accomplished the task before they turn it in for their teacher’s formative or summative evaluation.
Humans inherently want to set and meet personal goals, even though each goal we set and strive to accomplish comes with challenges to face and overcome. Uncertainty of what’s expected causes hesitation and doubt to creep into our minds, causing us to want to avoid involvement. Without clarity, uncertainty prevails, resulting in too great a risk of personal failure. Students (as well as adults) become more willing to take intellectual risks if, and when, they have clarity from the outset as to what they must do to succeed. Success Criteria are clearly intended to activate a personal incentive for people to engage in the task before them. With the explicit goals of Student Learning Targets and Success Criteria, students have the “roadmap” directions that they need to become independent, self-monitoring learners.
HOW TO ALIGN SUCCESS CRITERIA
When creating Success Criteria, the first task is to intentionally align the criteria to the Student Learning Target(s) but also to the “unwrapped” Essential Standard(s). This is to make certain that the concepts and skills of the Essential Standard(s) remain the primary focus for students to achieve. In doing so, educators may use “teacher wording” in their first draft of the Success Criteria. But this language may well be beyond the understanding of their students, so they will then need to do a bit of “wordsmithing” to those phrases to make sure that all the criteria are “student-friendly”.
To see the numerous educator-created and A.I.-generated examples of Success Criteria across elementary and secondary grades in multiple content areas, including tools, tips, and step-by-step instructions, see Integrating Teaching and Learning: "Timeless Essentials" for Creating Integrated Units of Study - Volume One, Chapter 6, pp. 107-132.
The following section headings of the chapters provide a preview of its contents:
- Why Success Criteria?
- Success Criteria Defined and Described
- Clarity for Instruction, Assessment, and Feedback
- Success Criteria Research
- How To Write Success Criteria for Single “Unwrapped” Essential Standards
- Open-Ended Contexts in Lesson Success Criteria
- Success Criteria for Multiple “Unwrapped” Essential Standards
- From Teacher-Worded to Student-Friendly Success Criteria
- Co-Creating Success Criteria with Students
- A Secondary School Experience in Co-Creating Success Criteria
- Practical Questions About Success Criteria
- Success Criteria for Students with Special Needs
- A.I.-Generated Success Criteria
- Keep The Focus on The Criteria, Not the A.I.-Generated Category Headings
- Guiding Questions for Creating Effective Success Criteri
- The “If-Then” Conclusion
For continuing information about all my “Timeless Essentials” that educators use to createquality units of study, I hope you will follow me on Facebook, Linked In, and Instagram!
I am always happy to answer questions you may have about any of these essential elements. Feel free to contact me at larry@larryainsworth.com. On my website, you will also see what past participants are saying about my Student Learning Targets and Success Criteria workshop and all the other “Timeless Essentials” workshops: