When you’re writing them, remember:

• Learning Goals should refer to understanding, knowledge, skills, or application.

• Success Criteria should refer to a concrete learning performance: something students will say, do, make, or write to indicate they’re moving toward the Learning Goal.

Because Success Criteria are aligned to a particular Learning Goal, thinking of them on their own (without the Learning Goal they “belong to”) doesn’t make a lot of sense. This relationship between the two (Success Criteria refer to and depend on a Learning Goal) means that Learning Goals need to be written first, before Success Criteria.

Learning Goals often begin with verbs like know, develop, become fluent, apply, understand, use, or extend. Success Criteria often begin with verbs like explain, describe, model, show, write, justify, or create. Some examples of Learning Goals and Success Criteria are:

Learning Goal

Success Criteria

Understand how the structure of DNA relates to its function

Define the terms, structure and function; describe the structure of DNA; explain why the base pair rule means DNA forms complementary strands and a double helix

Use what you know about reading strategies so that you can understand what the text says as you read

Use what you know about sounds and letters; ask yourself if the language makes sense; think about what you already know about the topic; use context clues when you come to a word you don’t know

Know how advertisers use persuasive techniques in multi-modal advertisements

Describe how soft and hard sells are conveyed; explain the positive and negative emotions an advertisement aims to provoke; describe what makes an advertisement particularly effective/persuasive

Represent and solve addition and subtraction word problems by using different representations

Explain what each number in the problem means; explain why you chose to add or subtract; explain how your representation shows adding or subtracting

While Learning Goals and Learning Experiences are related, they are fundamentally different components of Formative Assessment and it’s essential to distinguish between them.

A Learning Goal comes before a Learning Experience; it is, in fact, the reason for the Learning Experience. What this means for lesson planning is that the Learning Goal is established first, so that it can orient the design of aligned Learning Experiences. Put simply, the question, what will my students be doing? should only be asked when there is a clear answer to the question, why will they be doing it?

Below are examples of Learning Goals and Learning Experiences. Because the Learning Goals are substantive, students will need many more than the one Learning Experience shown to meet the goal.

Learning Goal

Learning Experience

Understand the chronicle of events that led up to the internment of Japanese-Americans in1942 and the causal relationships among these events

Create a timeline of the events leading up to the history of Japanese-American Internment

Understand how authors use archetypes to help us quickly recognize characters

Read two texts and identify which author uses an archetype and which author uses a stereotype

Use graphical representations to analyze exponential functions

Explore what happens to the graph of the function, f(x) = a^x when the value of a changes

It’s important to remember, however, that Learning Goals are part of a much more extensive progression of learning that builds from Learning Goals, through Building Blocks, all the way to standards. Even though Learning Goals are lesson-sized, they’re not isolated or discrete: the learning they describe is aligned to a standard and connected to other prior, concurrent, and future learning.

Learning Goals might be invisible because they often happen inside a student’s head—you can’t directly observe things like “knowing” or “understanding.” This is why Success Criteria should always be written as performances of learning that you can actually observe, things students will say, do, make, or write that will make the status of their learning visible.

Accessible Learning Goals and Success Criteria enables students to participate in and contribute to the learning community by evaluating their own and their peers’ learning. When students internalize Learning Goals and Success Criteria, it also helps them make meaning of challenging content. A clear sense of what the goal is and what it will look like as they move towards that goal can act like a cognitive lighthouse, a feature of the cognitive landscape with which students can organize and orient their learning.

Learning Goals

Describe what students are going to learn

Success Criteria

Indicate how students can demonstrate learning

Learning Experiences

Describe how students will acquire the learning

I understand that congruent figures remain congruent through the rigid motions of translations, rotations and reflections.

I understand that justifying my conclusions, communication with others, comparing plausible arguments and asking useful questions helps to clarify mathematical reasoning.

I understand that using clear and precise definitions helps to simplify and strengthen the mathematical reasoning process.

I can use a series of rigid motions to show that two triangles are congruent.

I can justify that there is more than one series of rigid motions to show two triangle’s congruence.

I can define congruence in terms of rigid motion to construct arguments explaining why two triangles are congruent.

Learning Task 1:

Use a sequence of rigid motions to show the two triangles are congruent.

Compare and contrast your work with peers. Are their steps the same as yours? If not, are their steps valid? If yes, can you find a different sequence of steps to illustrate congruence?

Learning Task 2:

Using the construction tools, construct a new triangle.

Use a series of rigid transformations on your triangle to create a congruent triangle.

Label the sides and angles you used to construct your original triangle as corresponding pairs of sides and/or angles in your pair of congruent triangles.

Trade the construction of your two triangles with another group. Prove that the other group’s two triangles are congruent.

Learning Task 3 (Real World Application):

Using your found design, use rigid motion to prove the parts are congruent.