What does great Backwards Planning of lessons really look like?  At EdLight, it’s getting to the level of: what do I want to see in student work that will show me students mastered the objective?

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Chunking learning objectives into Criteria for Success is an under-utilized way to guide students and their teachers to mastery. 

When you clarify what the Criteria for Success are for students, then you can finally give high-leverage feedback and students start to internalize the learning. 

Let’s take a look at a the 5th grade Evidence standard:

RI.5.1: Quote or paraphrase a text accurately when explaining what the text states explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. 

Too often, we see teachers throw this lesson objective up on the (digital) board:

Quote or paraphrase a text accurately when explaining what the text states explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. 

This is...not a lesson objective…. it’s the standard. You can’t master a standard in a lesson. How are students supposed to know what they are trying to achieve?

Instead, let’s break the objective down into these 4 criteria for success:

• My evidence answers the question or proves my idea 
• I chunked my evidence into only the most important part
• My evidence is in quotation marks, directly copied from text, with page number labeled 
• I gave context for the evidence (how it fits into the larger text/moment)

Putting myself in a student’s shoes, this is soooo much easier to understand. I now have direction. 

As a teacher, using Criteria for Success tees me up to give targeted feedback. I can give feedback faster because reviewing each student’s work takes less cognitive energy: I know what I am looking for and how I will respond if I don’t see it.

Criteria for Success are even more powerful when an entire team of teachers and coaches norms on them -- a best practice we see top-tier schools making time for -- so they can review student work together to better understand what grade level mastery looks like in day-to-day, authentic work.

Are you interested in learning more about how to implement this in your school or classroom? Let us know!

1 Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. New York: Routledge.

2 Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2011). The purposeful classroom: How to structure lessons with learning goals in mind. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.