In February of 2021, Mark Alcorn and I began recording our very first episodes of the Sum of It All podcast. For just over two years, we recorded an episode every week* as a way to create an asynchronous book club. But what many of you might not know is that we never aspired to be podcasters. We had been facilitating a book club when the pandemic forced our in-person meetings to online video chats. But after two rounds of online book clubs, we hit a few barriers and knew if we didn’t adjust we were going to lose the learning space for our math leaders and ourselves.
We turned to a design framework to help us rethink what we were doing. Instead of starting with beautiful prototypes and remarkably innovative ideas, we began with the foundation: getting really clear about our goal. The difficult truth for many educators is that identifying goals is not as easy as it sounds. Early in my journey to becoming a teacher, I can clearly recall my mentor teacher saying, “But Audrey, what is the goal?” I sat there, staring at the lesson plan that took me over an hour to create, filled to the brim with what I thought would be engaging activities with utter confusion - wasn’t the goal to do all these amazing things? My mentor teacher offered wise guidance, the gist of which has stayed with me: when we talk about goals outside of the classroom, we often are talking about what we’re trying to accomplish and as a result we end up confusing the task for the learning goal inside the classroom. Many of us reframe the goal as the learning outcome, learning target or learning objective to refocus on the learning rather than the doing. Whatever tool or reminders you use - getting clear about the goal is the firm foundation to build any learning experience upon.
As we launch into another school year, slowing down to get clear about the goal is critical in designing learning for all. For those of us leading professional learning, we are often drawn to the task because sometimes that’s all we’re given (“Please provide teachers PL on number talks/SEL/discourse, etc.” Sound familiar?). Instead, we need to get clear about the actual learning goal for the teachers. For those of us teaching in the classroom, we can be vigilant to not mislabel the task as the goal. We can recenter the learning target over the completion of the worksheet or finishing the problem.
While there’s more to the design framework than just the goals (we’ll share more next time), slowing down to refocus on our goals is critical as we kick off this new year. Let’s commit to getting clear about the learning target - for our students, our teachers, and ourselves.
*For those who listen to our podcast, we’ve been taking a break this summer to catch our breath and will drop a new season in September. Stay tuned!
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